John Nagle wrote: > Josiah Carlson wrote: [snip] >> Constant folding happens regardless of optimization level in current >> Pythons. > >> So really, assert and docstring removals. Eh. > > It's hard to optimize Python code well without global analysis. > The problem is that you have to make sure that a long list of "wierd > things", like modifying code or variables via getattr/setattr, aren't > happening before doing significant optimizations. Without that, > you're doomed to a slow implementation like CPython. > > ShedSkin, which imposes some restrictions, is on the right track here. > The __slots__ feature is useful but doesn't go far enough. [snip] > Python could get much, much faster. Right now CPython is said to be 60X > slower > than C. It should be possible to get at least an order of magnitude over > CPython.
Don't get me wrong; I'm all for adding optimizations, I was merely expressing that currently, 'python -OO' doesn't really do a whole lot. I've a long-time user of psyco, have mucked about with scipy.weave.inline, and have been a heavy user of Pyrex and C. If there was a method of offering some simple optimization cues to the Python runtime to improve its speed, I would be happy to add them when I really care about speed (I already do more than that when writing Pyrex). The real question is whether we can get a practical implementation of these optimizations as easy to use as psyco. - Josiah -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
