On 13/04/2017 09:08, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Wed, 12 Apr 2017 16:30:38 -0700, bart4858 wrote:
(Although I think Python would have difficulty in turning x+=1 into a
single opcode, if using normal object references and a shared object
model.)
You know, since Python actually exists and isn't just a hypothetical
language, we can find out what it actually does, not just guess :-)
import dis
code = compile("x += 1", "", "single")
dis.dis(code)
1 0 LOAD_NAME 0 (x)
3 LOAD_CONST 0 (1)
6 INPLACE_ADD
7 STORE_NAME 0 (x)
10 LOAD_CONST 1 (None)
13 RETURN_VALUE
There's an op-code for looking up the name 'x', another to push the
constant 1 on the stack, an op-code for "INPLACE_ADD", followed by an op-
code for STORE_NAME again.
In principle, we could replace the LOAD_CONST and INPLACE_ADD with a
single op-code that combines the two. Whether that would speed anything
up is another question.
Is it possible to skip the STORE_NAME op-code?
If the starting-point is the existing byte-code of a program, then what
can be done is more limited.
If the optimiser can generate new byte-codes, then it might be possible
to add an extra indirection, so that:
LOAD_NAME (x)
instead becomes (for example):
LOAD_NAME_REF (x)
INPLACE_ADD_REF
The latter doing all the work (indirectly access x, work out x+1 and
create a new object for that if necessary, then rebind the original x to
that new value, because now we have a reference to the name).
This means the byte-code set and the work some of them have to do is
more complex, but it has been suggested that reducing the number of
byte-code dispatches can be beneficial.
If you knew *for sure*
that the target (x) was a mutable object which implemented += using an in-
place mutation, then you could, but the only built-in where that applies
is list so even if you could guarantee x was a list, it hardly seems
worth the bother.
I think x+=y is most usefully optimised when x and y are numbers. But
numbers can't be modified in-place, not in general.
--
bartc
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