metaclasses and performance

[Lenard Lindstrom]

Mirko Dziadzka wrote:
> Hi all
> 
> I'm playing around with metaclasses and noticed, that there is small
> but mesurable a performance difference in the code shown below. With a 
> more complex example I get a 5 percent performance penalty for using a
> metaclass. Until today I assumed, that a metaclass has no performance
> impact at all after class creation. 
> Can someone explain me the performance difference between the two classes
> test1 and test2
> 
> Thank's in advance
> 
>     Mirko
> 
> ---- cut here -----
> 
> class meta(type):
>     pass
> 
> class test1(object):
>     __metaclass__ = meta                # using type via meta here
>     def __init__(self):
>         self.foo = 42
>     def get_foo(self):
>         return self.foo
> 
> class test2(object):
>     __metaclass__ = type                # using type directly
>     def __init__(self):
>         self.foo = 42
>     def get_foo(self):
>         return self.foo
> 
> # and here the performance test code ... it's only 2% on my machine
> import time
> for c in [test1, test2] * 10:
>     t = c()
>     start = time.time()
>     for i in xrange(10 * 1000 * 1000):
>         t.get_foo()
>     print c.__name__, time.time() - start
> 
> ---- cut here -----
> 
> 

I don't know if C asserts are active in release Python, but for 
new-style classes one thing that happens during attribute lookup is that 
an object's class is asserted to be an instance of type. Class test2 
immediately passes the test since its type is "type". But test1's type 
is meta, so a function is called to check that meta is a subclass of 
"type". This may be the cause of the slowdown. Otherwise attribute 
lookups for test1 and test2 instances are identical.


--
Lenard Lindstrom
<len-l at telus.net>