Raymond Hettinger wrote: > > [Nick Coghlan] >>> What about decimal-in-C, by the way? Is anyone still working on it? > > I'm seeking funding for the project. If it is forthcoming, I intend to do > a pure C version that simply implements the spec and then adds > wrappers for the pure python interface. That will save the cost > of constantly creating and modifying many pyobjects that currently > arise during intermediate calculations. > It's possible to focus just of the mantissa calculations but the cost of > the actual arithmetic work is swapped by the overhead of managing > contexts, checking for special values, and memory allocations. > Without addressing those, I think decimal will remain critically > performance challenged compared to native floats (decimals > will never be that fast, but they can get close enough to make > them a viable alternative for many kinds of work).
I actually agree with all that, but do you agree the mantissa work is still worthwhile in the near term (i.e. 3.1) to address the 25% or so slowdown between decimal in 2.x (with the mantissa as an 8-bit str) and decimal in 3.0 (with the mantissa as a unicode str, because using a bytes object to store the digits is actually slower due to the lack of a bytes->long fast path)? Cheers, Nick. -- Nick Coghlan | ncogh...@gmail.com | Brisbane, Australia --------------------------------------------------------------- _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
