Performance impact of using decorators

[Terry Reedy]

"vinjvinj" <vinjvinj at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:1142003515.886709.290360 at j33g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
> I'm building an application with cherrypy and have started using
> decorators quite extensively. A lot of my exposed functions look like:
>
> @expose
> @startTransactrionAndBuildPage
> @partOfTabUi(tabId)
> @convert(arg1=int, arg2=str)
> def do_main_page(self, arg1, arg2):
>   some code
>
>
> I've become really fond of decorators and use them quite a lot. I've
> also ready that function calls are expensive in python. In the above
> example, does the interpreter call 5 different functions?

As Alex said, perhaps.  A decorator that would not result in a runtime call 
would be one that, for example, registers the function somewhere and 
returns it unchanged and unwrapped.  @expose and @partOfTabUI both seem 
like they might do something like that.

IF the overhead becomes a problem, and if you use the same stack (or parts 
of a stack) of decorators for multiple functions, then you could write a 
few decorators that combine multiple actions with one call.

Terry Jan Reedy