[Python-Dev] [RELEASED] Python 3.3.0 release candidate 3

[Antoine Pitrou]

On Fri, 28 Sep 2012 21:51:39 +0100
Paul Moore <p.f.moore at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 28 September 2012 19:19, Stefan Krah <stefan at bytereef.org> wrote:
> > Brett Cannon <brett at python.org> wrote:
> >>     Georg Brandl <georg at python.org> wrote:
> >>     > * A C implementation of the "decimal" module, with up to 80x speedup
> >>     >     for decimal-heavy applications
> >>
> >>     Could you bump up the factor to 120x in the final announcement? There were
> >>     a couple of performance improvements in the meantime, and this is what I'm
> >>     consistently measuring now.
> >>
> >>
> >> Is that based on Modules/_decimal/tests/bench.py or some other benchmark?
> >
> > It's the pi benchmark from bench.py. This is what I'm typically getting
> > on a Core 2 Duo 3.16 GHz:
> >
> >
> > Precision: 9 decimal digits
> >
> > float:
> > result: 3.1415926535897927
> > time: 0.113188s
> >
> > cdecimal:
> > result: 3.14159265
> > time: 0.158313s
> >
> > decimal:
> > result: 3.14159265
> > time: 18.671457s
> >
> >
> > Precision: 19 decimal digits
> >
> > float:
> > result: 3.1415926535897927
> > time: 0.112874s
> >
> > cdecimal:
> > result: 3.141592653589793236
> > time: 0.348100s
> >
> > decimal:
> > result: 3.141592653589793236
> > time: 43.241220s
> 
> Wow! I had no idea cdecimal was that close in speed to float. That's
> seriously impressive.

I think this means the performance difference is on the same order
of magnitude as the CPython interpretation overhead. Still, it's
impressive indeed.

Regards

Antoine.


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