Python's garbage collection was Re: Python reliability

[Steve Holden]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> "Diez B. Roggisch" <deets at nospam.web.de> writes:
> 
>>That particular implementation used 3 or 4 tag-bits. Of course you are
>>right that nowadays python won't notice the difference, as larger nums
>>get implicitely converted to a suitable representation. But then the
>>efficiency goes away... Basically I think that trying to come up with
>>all sorts of optimizations for rather marginal problems (number
>>crunching should be - if a python domain at all - done using Numarray)
> 
> 
> I don't think it's necessarily marginal.  Tagged ints can be kept in
> registers, which means that even the simplest code that does stuff
> with small integers becomes a lot more streamlined, easing the load on
> both the Python GC and the cpu's memory cache.  Right now with the
> bytecode interpreter, it probably doesn't matter, but with Pypy
> generating native machine code, this kind of thing can make a real
> difference.

Until someone does the experiment this stuff is bound to be speculation 
(what's that saying about "premature optimization"?). But I can foresee 
that there'd be problems at the outer edges of the language: for 
example, sys.maxint would have to be reduced, and this in turn would 
lead to reduction in, for example, the theoretical maximum length of 
sequences.

Even if it reduced the average execution time of the "average" program, 
this will involve trade-offs which can only be fully appreciated in the 
light of practical experience.

regards
  Steve
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