[Python-Dev] Building a Faster Python (original) (raw)

Ronald Oussoren ronaldoussoren at mac.com
Mon Jul 22 09:50:53 CEST 2013

On 22 Jul, 2013, at 9:32, Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall at gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 9:32 AM, Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall at gmail.com> wrote:

On Mon, Jul 22, 2013 at 8:15 AM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

On Sun, 21 Jul 2013 16:36:35 -0700 Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger at gmail.com> wrote:

Our current Mac OS X builds use GCC-4.2.

On Python2.7, I ran a comparison of gcc-4.2.1 builds versus gcc-4.8.1 and found that the latter makes a much faster Python. PyBench2.0 shows the total running time dropping from 5653ms to 4571ms. The code is uniformly better in just about every category. You could try running the benchmarks suite to see what that gives: http://hg.python.org/benchmarks/ Regards Antoine. or pypy benchmark suite which is more comprehensive for python 2.7 (http://bitbucket.org/pypy/benchmarks) Besides, is there any reason not to use clang by default on OS X?

The 32-bit installer contains binaries that work on PPC, that's why those are built using an older version of Xcode. I'd have to check if that version of Xcode supports clang, and if that version of clang is good enough.

The "intel" installer can, and should, be build with clang (and preferably with the most recent Xcode release to ensure that the latest supported compiler is used).

Note that the CPython configure script, and distutils, already use clang by default if you a recent Xcode but that's primarily because gcc is llvm-gcc when you use Xcode and llvm-gcc is broken (it miscompiles at least the unicode implementation in Python 3.3), this overrides the default behavior of configure (using gcc whenever it is available unless the user explictly overrides).

Ronald

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