using a custom, nearly-identical macro. This probably changes how some of
these functions are compiled, which may result in fractionally slower (or
faster) execution. Considering the nature of traversal, visiting much of the
address space in unpredictable patterns, I'd argue the code readability and
maintainability is well worth it ;P
- The copy module now "copies" function objects (as atomic objects).
- dict.__getitem__ now looks for a __missing__ hook before raising
KeyError.
- Added a new type, defaultdict, to the collections module.
This uses the new __missing__ hook behavior added to dict (see above).
This gives another 30% speedup for operations such as
map(func, d.iteritems()) or list(d.iteritems()) which can both take
advantage of length information when provided.
* Split into three separate types that share everything except the
code for iternext. Saves run time decision making and allows
each iternext function to be specialized.
* Inlined PyDict_Next(). In addition to saving a function call, this
allows a redundant test to be eliminated and further specialization
of the code for the unique needs of each iterator type.
* Created a reusable result tuple for iteritems(). Saves the malloc
time for tuples when the previous result was not kept by client code
(this is the typical use case for iteritems). If the client code
does keep the reference, then a new tuple is created.
Results in a 20% to 30% speedup depending on the size and sparsity
of the dictionary.
* Factored constant structure references out of the inner loops for
PyDict_Next(), dict_keys(), dict_values(), and dict_items().
Gave measurable speedups to each (the improvement varies depending
on the sparseness of the dictionary being measured).
* Added a freelist scheme styled after that for tuples. Saves around
80% of the calls to malloc and free. About 10% of the time, the
previous dictionary was completely empty; in those cases, the
dictionary initialization with memset() can be skipped.