The Cost of Dynamism (was Re: Pyhon 2.x or 3.x, which is faster?)

[Rustom Mody]

On Saturday, March 12, 2016 at 7:50:43 AM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 12, 2016 at 12:16 PM, BartC  wrote:
> > You'd be surprised how much any kind of program relies on adhoc integer
> > operations. It doesn't need to work with large int arrays for them to be
> > important. (Look at the benchmark below: the inner loop is nearly all
> > integer ops.)
> 
> Sure, but in real-world code, there are other considerations than just
> integer performance. If someone waves a magic wand and improves
> machine-word integer performance, great, but there are other calls on
> core dev time.

I guess that BartC (or is it Bartc?) is describing something that is a 
commonplace in compiler world but not so well known elsewhere, viz.
a simple operation like an array/attribute-access etc, which from a HLL pov
may have no 'operations' at all may emit a slew of integer operations when
compiled.  Which is not so surprising if you consider that apart from
control-flow there is nothing going on in a CPU beside arithmetic; there
is no datatype beside integers of various sizes and (un)signed combos.