[Python-Dev] Optimizing list.sort() by checking type in advance (original) (raw)

Guido van Rossum guido at python.org
Mon Oct 10 22:05:44 EDT 2016

So maybe someone should explain to Elliott why his own benchmarks are not trustworthy, rather than just repeat "use perf or timeit". Actually, there are two things: (a) when something new comes along it always needs to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is actually an improvement and not a timing artifact or a trick; (b) you can't time sorting 10 values once and get a useful result. You have to do it many times. And you have to make sure that creating a list of 10 random values isn't taken as part of your test -- that's tricky since random() isn't all that fast; but it has to be done.

Although Elliott had it coming when he used needlessly offensive language in his first post.

On Mon, Oct 10, 2016 at 5:09 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info> wrote:

On Mon, Oct 10, 2016 at 09:16:32PM +0000, Elliot Gorokhovsky wrote:

Anyway, benchmarking technique aside, the point is that it it works well for small lists (i.e. doesn't affect performance). You've been shown that there is something suspicious about your benchmarking technique, something that suggests that the timing results aren't trustworthy. Until you convince us that your timing results are reliable and trustworthy, you shouldn't be drawing any conclusions about your fastsort versus the standard sort. -- Steve

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-- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)

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