[Python-Dev] memcmp performance (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Sun Oct 23 23:44:05 CEST 2011

I am still rooting for -fno-builtin-memcmp in both Python 2.7 and 3.3 ... (after we put memcmp in unicodecompare)

-1. We shouldn't do anything about this. Python has the tradition of not working around platform bugs, except if the work-arounds are necessary to make something work at all - i.e. in particular not for performance issues.

If this is a serious problem, then platform vendors need to look into it (CPU vendor, compiler vendor, OS vendor). If they don't act, it's probably not a serious problem.

In the specific case, I don't think it's a problem at all. It's not that memcmp is slow with the builtin version - it's just not as fast as it could be. Adding a compiler option would put a maintenance burden on Python - we already have way too many compiler options in configure.in, and there is no good procedure to ever take them out should they not be needed anymore.

Regards, Martin

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