[Python-Dev] Tagged integers (original) (raw)

M.-A. Lemburg mal at egenix.com
Wed Jul 14 11:16:29 CEST 2004

James Y Knight wrote:

So I was saying to someone the other day "Gee, I wonder why Python doesn't use tagged integers, it seems like it would be a lot faster than allocating new objects all the time.", and they said "Cause you'd have to change everything, too much work!" and I said "Nah, you only need to change a few things to use macros, it'd only take a few hours, mostly query-replace".

So, of course, I had to do it then, and it only took a couple hours, and appears to be at least somewhat faster. On the test that probably puts my change in the most positive light possible: "x = 0; while x < 50000000: x = x + 1", it achieves about a 50% increase in speed. More normal integer-heavy things seem to be at most 20% faster.

Interesting. I would have thought that hackery like this would result in more significant speedups. Looks like the Python implementation is darn fast already :-)

Note that Python shares small integers and uses a free list for the rest, so most of the times, the implementation can create objects using already allocated memory.

I'd rather not like to see hackery like misused pointers in the core, so you can count me as -1 on this.

-- Marc-Andre Lemburg eGenix.com

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