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Re: Calling a function is faster than not calling it?

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Steven D'Aprano wrote:

> Why is calling a function faster than bypassing the function object and
> evaluating the code object itself? And not by a little, but by a lot?

> Directly eval'ing the code object is easily more than twice as expensive
> than calling the function, but calling the function has to eval the code
> object. That suggests that the overhead of calling the function is
> negative, which is clearly ludicrous.
> 
> I knew that calling eval() on a string was slow, as it has to parse and
> compile the source code into byte code before it can evaluate it, but this
> is pre-compiled and shouldn't have that overhead.
> 
> So what's going on?

A significant part of the extra time is apparently spent on stack 
inspection:

$ python3 -m timeit -s 'f = (lambda: 42); code = f.__code__; ns = {}' 'f()'
10000000 loops, best of 3: 0.179 usec per loop

$ python3 -m timeit -s 'f = (lambda: 42); code = f.__code__; ns = {}' 
'eval(code)'
1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.852 usec per loop

$ python3 -m timeit -s 'f = (lambda: 42); code = f.__code__; ns = {}' 
'eval(code, ns)'
1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.433 usec per loop

$ python3 -m timeit -s 'f = (lambda: 42); code = f.__code__; ns = {}' 'eval; 
ns; f()'
1000000 loops, best of 3: 0.263 usec per loop

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Thread

Calling a function is faster than not calling it? Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python@pearwood.info> - 2015-05-10 19:58 +1000
  Re: Calling a function is faster than not calling it? Christian Gollwitzer <auriocus@gmx.de> - 2015-05-10 12:34 +0200
    Re: Calling a function is faster than not calling it? Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python@pearwood.info> - 2015-05-11 01:04 +1000
  Re: Calling a function is faster than not calling it? Peter Otten <__peter__@web.de> - 2015-05-10 12:43 +0200
    Re: Calling a function is faster than not calling it? Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python@pearwood.info> - 2015-05-11 00:49 +1000
      Re: Calling a function is faster than not calling it? Peter Otten <__peter__@web.de> - 2015-05-10 18:14 +0200
      Re: Calling a function is faster than not calling it? Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly@gmail.com> - 2015-05-10 10:25 -0600
  Re: Calling a function is faster than not calling it? Terry Reedy <tjreedy@udel.edu> - 2015-05-10 12:37 -0400
  Re: Calling a function is faster than not calling it? BartC <bc@freeuk.com> - 2015-05-10 22:08 +0100
    Re: Calling a function is faster than not calling it? Steven D'Aprano <steve+comp.lang.python@pearwood.info> - 2015-05-11 13:58 +1000
      Re: Calling a function is faster than not calling it? BartC <bc@freeuk.com> - 2015-05-11 10:50 +0100
        Re: Calling a function is faster than not calling it? Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro@gmail.com> - 2015-05-11 09:12 -0500
          Re: Calling a function is faster than not calling it? BartC <bc@freeuk.com> - 2015-05-11 16:01 +0100
            Re: Calling a function is faster than not calling it? Skip Montanaro <skip.montanaro@gmail.com> - 2015-05-11 10:13 -0500
      Re: Calling a function is faster than not calling it? Tony the Tiger <tony@tiger.invalid> - 2015-05-15 01:35 +0000
  Re: Calling a function is faster than not calling it? Stefan Behnel <stefan_ml@behnel.de> - 2015-05-11 08:11 +0200
  Re: Calling a function is faster than not calling it? Piet van Oostrum <piet@vanoostrum.org> - 2015-06-22 23:49 +0200

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