"Stefan Behnel" <stefan...@behnel.de> wrote in message
news:mailman.470.1283712666.29448.python-l...@python.org...
BartC, 05.09.2010 19:09:
All those compilers that offer loop unrolling are therefore wasting
their time...
Sometimes they do, yes.
Modifying the OP's code a little:
a = 0
for i in xrange(100000000): # 100 million
a = a + 10 # add 10 or 100
print a
Manually unrolling such a loop four times (ie. 4 copies of the body, and
counting only to 25 million) increased the speed by between 16% and 47% (ie.
runtime reducing by between 14% and 32%).
This depended on whether I added +10 or +100 (ie. whether long integers are
needed), whether it was inside or outside a function, and whether I was
running Python 2 or 3 (BTW why doesn't Python 3 just accept 'xrange' as a
synonym for 'range'?)
These are just some simple tests on my particular machine and
implementations, but they bring up some points:
(1) Loop unrolling does seem to have a benefit, when the loop body is small.
(2) Integer arithmetic seems to go straight from 32-bits to long integers;
why not use 64-bits before needing long integers?
(3) Since the loop variable is never used, why not have a special loop
statement that repeats code so many times? This can be very fast, since the
loop counter need not be a Python object, and probably there would be no
need for unrolling at all:
repeat 100000000: # for example
a = a + 10
--
Bartc
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