[Python-Dev] Python startup time: String objects

[Martin v. Löwis]

> But is this really where the time goes?  On my home box (~11K
> pystones/second) I can allocate 12K strings in 17 msec.

I have now implemented this change, and it gives 2% speed-up for
an empty source file. The change is at http://python.org/sf/923098.

> It seems that marshalling would have to become a two-pass thing,
> unless you want to limit that dict/list to function scope, in which
> case I'm not sure it'll make much of a difference.

It's actually simpler than that. Marshalling recursively marshals code
objects that have already been created, and traverses them all.
So a single dict/list is sufficient. The change is 60 lines in marshal.c

Regards,
Martin