Things we think the Python community will like.
- Frame optimizations: once a function is called it retains the allocated frame for use in future calls, avoiding allocation and initialization overhead. Frame size has also been slightly reduced.
PyStone is over 10% higher on RichardJones' test machine, compared to Python 2.4 (from 20242 to 22935). PyBench reports an overall slowdown, attributed to a 150% slowdown in a piece of code that wasn't changed. Sigh.
Made Gzip readline 30-40% faster (BobIppolito)
Speed up Unicode operations (AndrewDalke, FredrikLundh). Most notable, repeat is much faster, and most search operations (find, index, count, in) are a LOT faster (20x for the related stringbench tests). Also, rsplit is now as fast as split, and splitlines is nearly as fast as a plain split("\n"). Current stringbench results:
str(ms) uni(ms) % comment
-----------------------------------------------------
2271.31 3608.32 62.9 TOTAL 2.5a2
2261.85 1187.84 190.4 TOTAL tuesday
2247.84 875.13 256.9 TOTAL wednesday- (yes, the Unicode string type is now more than twice as fast on this set of tests, and over 4 times faster than when we started. ymmv.)
Patch 1335972 was a combination bugfix+speedup for string->int conversion. These are the speedups measured on my Windows box for decimal strings of various lengths. Note that the difference between 9 and 10 is the difference between short and long Python ints on a 32-bit box. The patch doesn't actually do anything to speed conversion to long directly; the speedup in those cases is solely due to detecting "unsigned long" overflow more quickly: