PATCH: Speed up direct string concatenation by 20+%!

[Steve Holden]

Larry Hastings wrote:
> Fredrik Lundh wrote:
> 
>>so what does the benchmark look like if you actually do this ?
> 
> 
> Okay, timing this:
>   x = ""
>   for i in range(100000):
>     x += "a"
>   t = x[1] # forces the concat object to render
> 
> The result:
>   Python 2.5 release: 30.0s
>   Python 2.5 locally built: 30.2s
>   Python 2.5 concat: 4.3s
>   Improvement: 600% (1/7 of the time)
> 
> 
> /larry/
> 
Interesting. Does a comparison also force it to render? If not, I wonder 
if comparisons might not end up slower. It does sound like memory usage 
might go through the roof with this technique under certain 
circumstances, so the more extensive your tests are the more likely you 
are to see the change actually used (I'm not convinced you'll persuade 
the developers to include this).

Whether or not it does get incorporated I think it's a great 
demonstration of how amenable Python is to experimentation with 
alternate representations, and I think your project might make a very 
interesting PyCon paper for people who were thinking about joining the 
development effort but hadn't yet started.

regards
  Steve
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