[Python-Dev] Speeding up CPython 5-10% (original) (raw)

Mark Lawrence breamoreboy at yahoo.co.uk
Mon Feb 1 17:50:29 EST 2016

On 01/02/2016 16:54, Yury Selivanov wrote:

On 2016-01-29 11:28 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote: On Wed, Jan 27, 2016 at 01:25:27PM -0500, Yury Selivanov wrote: Hi,

tl;dr The summary is that I have a patch that improves CPython performance up to 5-10% on macro benchmarks. Benchmarks results on Macbook Pro/Mac OS X, desktop CPU/Linux, server CPU/Linux are available at [1]. There are no slowdowns that I could reproduce consistently. Have you looked at Cesare Di Mauro's wpython? As far as I know, it's now unmaintained, and the project repo on Google Code appears to be dead (I get a 404), but I understand that it was significantly faster than CPython back in the 2.6 days. https://wpython.googlecode.com/files/Beyond%20Bytecode%20-%20A%20Wordcode-based%20Python.pdf Thanks for bringing this up! IIRC wpython was about using "fat" bytecodes, i.e. using 64bits per bytecode instead of 8. That allows to minimize the number of bytecodes, thus having some performance increase. TBH, I don't think it was "significantly faster".

From https://code.google.com/archive/p/wpython/

WPython is a re-implementation of (some parts of) Python, which drops support for bytecode in favour of a wordcode-based model (where a is word is 16 bits wide).

It also implements an hybrid stack-register virtual machine, and adds a lot of other optimizations.

-- My fellow Pythonistas, ask not what our language can do for you, ask what you can do for our language.

Mark Lawrence

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