[New-bugs-announce] [issue34719] Deprecate set to frozenset conversion in set.__contains__

[Javier Dehesa]

New submission from Javier Dehesa <javidcf at gmail.com>:

This comes from this SO question: https://stackoverflow.com/q/52382983/1782792

Currently, this works:

    > print({1, 2} in {frozenset({1, 2}))
    # True

This is strange because set is unhashable. Apparently, it is a case-specific feature implemented back in 2003 (https://github.com/python/cpython/commit/19c2d77842290af9b5f470c1eea2a71d1f77c9fe), by which set objects are converted to frozensets when checking for membership in another set. Personally I feel this is a bit surprising and inconsistent, but that is not the only issue with it. In the original implementation, this conversion was basically free because the created frozenset used the same storage as the given one. In the current implementation, however (https://github.com/python/cpython/blob/3.7/Objects/setobject.c#L1888-L1906), a new frozenset object is created, copied from the previous one. It seems this was done for thread-safety. The problem with that is that it is significantly more expensive:

    s = set(range(100000))
    sf = frozenset(s)
    t = { sf }
    %timeit sf in t  # True
    >>> 31.6 ns ± 1.04 ns per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 10000000 loops each)
    %timeit s in t  # True
    >>> 4.9 ms ± 168 µs per loop (mean ± std. dev. of 7 runs, 100 loops each)

In the above case, using the conversion takes five order of magnitude more time than the regular check. I suppose there is a memory impact too.

I think this (as far as I know) undocumented feature does not provide a significant usability gain, is inconsistent with the documented behavior of set and gives rise to obscurely underperfoming code. Removing it would be a breaking change, but again, affected code would be relying on undocumented behavior (or even "against-documentation" behavior).

----------
components: Interpreter Core
messages: 325631
nosy: Javier Dehesa
priority: normal
severity: normal
status: open
title: Deprecate set to frozenset conversion in set.__contains__
type: behavior
versions: Python 2.7, Python 3.4, Python 3.5, Python 3.6, Python 3.7, Python 3.8

_______________________________________
Python tracker <report at bugs.python.org>
<https://bugs.python.org/issue34719>
_______________________________________