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Author Demur Rumed
Recipients Demur Rumed, benjamin.peterson, brett.cannon, georg.brandl, ncoghlan, serhiy.storchaka, vstinner, yselivanov
Date 2016-03-29.15:40:41
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Message-id <1459266041.79.0.349001120247.issue26647@psf.upfronthosting.co.za>
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I'll dig up benchmark results when I get home, but I'd be interested to get results on a less wannabe RISC CPU

The change is to have all instructions take an argument. This removes the branch on each instruction on whether to load oparg. It then also aligns instructions to always be 2 bytes rather than 1 or 3 by having arguments only take up 1 byte. In the case that an argument to an instruction is greater than 255, it can chain EXTENDED_ARG up to 3 times. In practice this rarely occurs, mostly only for jumps, & abarnert measured stdlib to be ~5% smaller

The rationale is that this offers 3 benefits: Smaller code size, simpler instruction iteration/indexing (One may now scan backwards, as peephole.c does in this patch), which between the two results in a small perf gain (the only way for perf to be negatively impacted is by an increase in EXTENDED_ARGs, when I post benchmarking I'll also post a count of how many more EXTENDED_ARGs are emitted)

This also means that if I want to create something like a tracer that tracks some information for each instruction, I can allocate an array of codesize/2 bytes, then index off of half the instruction index. This isn't currently done in peephole.c, nor does this include halving jump opargs

I've looked up the 'recent work to cache attribute/global lookup' issue I mentioned: http://bugs.python.org/issue26219
I believe that patch would benefit from this one, but it'd be better to get Yury's opinion that belief
History
Date User Action Args
2016-03-29 15:40:41Demur Rumedsetrecipients: + Demur Rumed, brett.cannon, georg.brandl, ncoghlan, vstinner, benjamin.peterson, serhiy.storchaka, yselivanov
2016-03-29 15:40:41Demur Rumedsetmessageid: <1459266041.79.0.349001120247.issue26647@psf.upfronthosting.co.za>
2016-03-29 15:40:41Demur Rumedlinkissue26647 messages
2016-03-29 15:40:41Demur Rumedcreate