[issue17301] An in-place version of many bytearray methods is needed

[Serhiy Storchaka]

Serhiy Storchaka added the comment:

Python interpreter itself takes 20-30 MB of memory. Using it on a machine that has no few tens of free memory doesn't make much sense. MicroPython can be an exception, but it has special modules for low-level programming.

If you need to proceed so large bytearray that creating yet one copy of it is not possible, it can be translated by separate elements or smaller chunks.

$ ./python -m perf timeit -s "table = bytes(range(256)).swapcase(); data = bytearray(range(256))*1000" -- "for i in range(len(data)): data[i] = table[data[i]]"
Median +- std dev: 205 ms +- 10 ms
$ ./python -m perf timeit -s "table = bytes(range(256)).swapcase(); data = bytearray(range(256))*1000" -- "for i in range(0, len(data), 100): data[i:i+100] = data[i:i+100].translate(table)"
Median +- std dev: 12.9 ms +- 0.6 ms
$ ./python -m perf timeit -s "table = bytes(range(256)).swapcase(); data = bytearray(range(256))*1000" -- "for i in range(0, len(data), 1000): data[i:i+1000] = data[i:i+1000].translate(table)"
Median +- std dev: 3.12 ms +- 0.22 ms
$ ./python -m perf timeit -s "table = bytes(range(256)).swapcase(); data = bytearray(range(256))*1000" -- "for i in range(0, len(data), 10000): data[i:i+10000] = data[i:i+10000].translate(table)"
Median +- std dev: 1.79 ms +- 0.14 ms

Translating by chunks also works with data that can't be fit in memory at all. You can mmap large file or read and write it by blocks. In-place bytearray method wouldn't help in this case.

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Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue17301>
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