A new API (only accessible from C) to interrupt a thread by sending it
an exception. This is not always effective, but might help some people.
Requested by Just van Rossum and Alex Martelli. It is intentional
that you have to write your own C extension to call it from Python.
Docs will have to wait.
* Can now test for basic blocks.
* Optimize inverted comparisions.
* Optimize unary_not followed by a conditional jump.
* Added a new opcode, NOP, to keep code size constant.
* Applied NOP to previous transformations where appropriate.
Note, the NOP would not be necessary if other functions were
added to re-target jump addresses and update the co_lnotab mapping.
That would yield slightly faster and cleaner bytecode at the
expense of optimizer simplicity and of keeping it decoupled
from the line-numbering structure.
Added two predictions:
GET_ITER --> FOR_ITER
FOR_ITER --> STORE_FAST or UNPACK_SEQUENCE
Improves timings on pybench and timeit.py. Pystone results are neutral.
Applied to common cases:
COMPARE_OP is often followed by a JUMP_IF.
JUMP_IF is usually followed by POP_TOP.
Shows improved timings on PyStone, PyBench, and specific tests
using timeit.py:
python timeit.py -s "x=1" "if x==1: pass"
python timeit.py -s "x=1" "if x==2: pass"
python timeit.py -s "x=1" "if x: pass"
python timeit.py -s "x=100" "while x!=1: x-=1"
Potential future candidates:
GET_ITER predicts FOR_ITER
FOR_ITER predicts STORE_FAST or UNPACK_SEQUENCE
Also, applied missing goto fast_next_opcode to DUP_TOPX.
My previous patches should have used fast_next_opcode
in a few places instead of continue.
Also, applied one PyInt_AS_LONG macro in a place where
the type had already been checked.
-DCALL_PROFILE: Count the number of function calls executed.
When this symbol is defined, the ceval mainloop and helper functions
count the number of function calls made. It keeps detailed statistics
about what kind of object was called and whether the call hit any of
the special fast paths in the code.
Optimization:
When we take the fast_function() path, which seems to be taken for
most function calls, and there is minimal frame setup to do, avoid
call PyEval_EvalCodeEx(). The eval code ex function does a lot of
work to handle keywords args and star args, free variables,
generators, etc. The inlined version simply allocates the frame and
copies the arguments values into the frame.
The optimization gets a little help from compile.c which adds a
CO_NOFREE flag to code objects that don't have free variables or cell
variables. This change allows fast_function() to get into the fast
path with fewer tests.
I measure a couple of percent speedup in pystone with this change, but
there's surely more that can be done.