[Python-Dev] Optimization (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Sun Oct 6 01:37:56 CEST 2013

On Sun, 6 Oct 2013 09:32:30 +1000 Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

On 6 Oct 2013 08:59, "Antoine Pitrou" <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote: > > On Sat, 5 Oct 2013 15:35:30 -0700 > Raymond Hettinger <raymond.hettinger at gmail.com> wrote: > > > > Making bytearray's efficiently pop from the left side is dubious. > > This isn't a common idiom, nor should it be. Even if all the > > other implementations could model this behavior, it wouldn't > > be a good idea to have bytearrays have different performance > > characteristics than strings. > > Bytearrays are mutable and strings are immutable, so evidently they > will have different performance characteristics.

I suspect "list" may have been the intended comparison there. "array.array" is another appropriate comparison. Having bytearray operations differ in algorithmic complexity from those two types would be very strange and surprising (particularly if it was CPython specific).

It's only strange because you don't understand the main use case for bytearrays. They may look like arrays of 8-bit integers but they are really used for buffers, so optimizing for stuff like FIFO operation makes sense.

Regards

Antoine.

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