[Python-Dev] Re: native code compiler? (or, OCaml vs. Python)

[Jeremy Hylton]

My recollection from Skip's rattlesnake paper and from a similar paper
about peephole optimizations in Interlisp is that we'll see perhaps a
5-10% speedup by focusing on the small stuff.

I expect that the builtin-specific opcodes will do more than that, but
the module-level namespace still ends up being expensive to use and
arbitrary module globals are probably called as often as any other
global.  It'd be interesting to measure how many of the LOAD_GLOBAL
calls are for builtin names using some simple benchmarks.

Jeremy