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[Python-Dev] default of returning None hurts performance?

Collin Winter collinw at gmail.com
Tue Sep 1 00:28:29 CEST 2009 
On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 3:07 PM, Gregory P. Smith<greg at krypto.org> wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 2:20 PM, Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:
>>
>> Gregory P. Smith <greg <at> krypto.org> writes:
>> >
>> > food for thought as noticed by a coworker who has been profiling some
>> > hot code
>> to optimize a library...If a function does not have a return statement we
>> return
>> None.  Ironically this makes the foo2 function below faster than the bar2
>> function at least as measured using bytecode size
>>
>> I would be surprised if this "bytecode size" difference made a significant
>> difference in runtimes, given that function call cost should dwarf the
>> cumulated
>> cost of POP_TOP and LOAD_CONST (two of the simplest opcodes you could
>> find).
>>
>
> the attached sample code repeatably shows that it makes a difference though
> its really not much of one (2-3%).
>
> I was just wondering if a bytecode for a superinstruction of the common
> sequence:
>
>              6 POP_TOP
>               7 LOAD_CONST               0 (None)
>              10 RETURN_VALUE
>
> might be worth it.

I doubt it. You'd save a bit of stack manipulation, but since this
will only appear at the end of a function, I'd be skeptical that this
would make any macrobenchmarks (statistically) significantly faster.

Collin Winter
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