On 24 Nov, 19:25, Antoine Pitrou <solip...@pitrou.net> wrote: > > Sorry, I have trouble parsing your sentence. Do you mean bytecode > interpretation overhead is minimal compared to the cost of actual useful > work, or the contrary? > (IMO both are wrong by the way)
I'm referring to what you're talking about at the end. The enhancements in Python 3 presumably came about after discussion of "threaded interpreters", confirming that the evaluation loop in Python 2 was not exactly optimal. > > I imagine that someone (or a number of people) must have profiled the > > Python interpreter and shown how much time goes on the individual > > bytecode implementations and how much goes on the interpreter's own > > housekeeping activities. > > Well the one problem is that it's not easy to draw a line. Another > problem is that it depends on the workload. If you are compressing large > data or running expensive regular expressions the answer won't be the > same as if you compute a Mandelbrot set in pure Python. You need to draw the line between work done by system and external libraries and that done by Python, but a breakdown of the time spent executing each kind of bytecode instruction could be interesting. Certainly, without such actual cost estimations, a simple counting of bytecodes should hardly give an indication of how optimal some Python code might be. Paul -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
