On 02/04/2013 15:03, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Tue, 02 Apr 2013 11:58:11 +0100, Steve Simmons wrote:
It seems to me that jmf *might* be moving towards a vindicated position.
There is some interest now in duplicating, understanding and
(hopefully!) extending his test results, which can only be a Good Thing
- whatever the outcome and wherever the facepalm might land.
Some interest "now"? Oh please.
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2012-September/629810.html
Mark Lawrence even created a bug report to track this, also back in
September.
http://bugs.python.org/issue16061
I'm sure you didn't intend to be insulting, but some of us *have* taken
JMF seriously, at least at first. His repeated overblown claims of how
Python is destroying Unicode, his lack of acknowledgement that other
people have seen string handling *speed up* not slow down, and his
refusal to assist in diagnosing this performance regression except to
repeatedly quote the same artificial micro-benchmarks over and over again
have lost him whatever credibility he started with.
This feature is a *memory optimization*, not a speed optimization, and
yet as a side-effect of saving memory, it also saves time. Real-world
benchmarks of actual applications demonstrate this. One or two trivial
slowdowns of artificial micro-benchmarks simply are not important, even
if they are genuine. I believe they are genuine, but likely operating
system and hardware dependent.
First off, no insult intended and I haven't been part of this list long
enough to be fully immersed in the history of this so I'm sure there are
events of which I am unaware.
However, it seems to me that, for whatever reason, JMF has reached the
end of his capacity (time, capability, patience, ...) to extend his
benchmarks into a more credible test set - i.e. one that demonstrates an
acceptably 'real life' profile with a marked drop in performance. As a
community we have choices. We can brand him a Troll - and some of his
behaviour may mandate that - or we can put some additional energy into
drawing this 'disagreement' to a more amicable and constructive conclusion.
My post was primarily aimed at recognising the work that people like
Mark, Neil and others have done to move the problem forward and was
intended to help shift the focus to a more productive approach. Again,
my apologies if it was ill timed or ill-directed.
Steve Simmons
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