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Python 3.13 Gets a JIT

tonybaloney.github.io

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Re: Python 3.13 Gets a JIT

#91

Post by lifthrasiir »

ageitgey wrote: post #3

For the lazy who just want to know if this makes Python faster yet, this is foundational work to enable later improvements: > The initial benchmarks show something of a 2-9% performance improvement. > I think that whilst the first version of this JIT isn’t going to seriously dent any benchmarks (yet), it opens the door to some huge optimizations and not just ones that benefit the toy benchmark programs in the standar…

An important context here is that the same code was reused for interpreter and JIT implementations (that's a main selling point for copy-and-patch JIT). In the other words, this 2--9% improvement mostly represents the core interpreter overhead that JIT should significant reduce. It was even possible that JIT itself might have no performance impact by itself, so this result is actually very encouraging; any future opcode specialization and refinement should directly translate to a measurable improvement.

Re: Python 3.13 Gets a JIT

#93

Post by toyg »

bomewish wrote: post #83
Topfi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, 2-9% already seems like a very signficant improvement, especially since as they mention "remember that CPython is already written in C". Whilst it's great to look at the potential for even greater gains by building upon this work, I feel we shouldn't undersell what's been accomplished.

Also recall that a 50% speed improvement in SQLite was caused by 50-100 different optimisations that each eeked out 0.5-1% speedups. On phone now don’t have the ref but it all adds up.

Marginal gains. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34247629

Re: Python 3.13 Gets a JIT

#94

Post by Akronymus »

bomewish wrote: post #83
Topfi wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, 2-9% already seems like a very signficant improvement, especially since as they mention "remember that CPython is already written in C". Whilst it's great to look at the potential for even greater gains by building upon this work, I feel we shouldn't undersell what's been accomplished.

Also recall that a 50% speed improvement in SQLite was caused by 50-100 different optimisations that each eeked out 0.5-1% speedups. On phone now don’t have the ref but it all adds up.

I tried searching for that article because I vaguely recall it, but can't find it either. But yeah, a lot of small improvements add up. Reminds me of this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ5Lwzrdoe8

Re: Python 3.13 Gets a JIT

#96

Post by onetoo »

mg wrote: post #90

I love Python and use it for everything other than web development. One reason is performance. So if Python has a faster future ahead of it: Hurray! The other reason is that the Python ecosystem moved away from stateless requests like CGI or mod_php use and now is completely set on long running processes. Does this still mean you have to restart your local web application after any change you made to it? I heard that…

The restart isn't expensive in absolute terms, on a human level it's practically instant. You would only do this during development, hopefully your local machine isn't the production environment.

It's also very easy, often just adding a CLI flag to your local run command.

edit: Regarding performance, Python today can easily handle at least 1k requests per second. The vast vast vast majority of web applications today don't need anywhere near that kind of performance.

Re: Python 3.13 Gets a JIT

#97

Post by fnord123 »

This could be headed for another dead end imo.

Context: I use python for data processing and webdev. When doing data processing, Python is merely glue for libraries in compiled languages. When doing webdev, I mostly use python itself.

First, any numbers regarding benchmarks need to be treated with contempt. JITs are unbenchmarkable. No matter what you do, someone says you do it wrong. Warmed up the JIT? You did it wrong. Didn't warm up the JIT? You did it wrong. Warmed up and didn't warm up the JIT? Wrong.

You lose predictable performance characteristics due to the above. It's difficult to describe the importance of this to the people who look at Python as glue for their compiled code.

Next, on the face of it, it doesn't look like it will compose well with subinterpreters. If each subinterpreter does it's own tracing, it's going to be harder to hit the 10k watermark of jitting hot code.

This uses LLVM's JIT which is particularly slow and heavy (16MB added to the binary size) last time I tried to use it. So this limits Python attractiveness in being an embedded language.

While this remains experimental - and hence strictly optional, packaging this in distributions that use gcc would now apparently need llvm tools installed to build python. Expect feedback from distribution packagers.

Idea for improvement: when I do data processing, I'm using python to glue bits of C, Rust, and other compiled languages so this is not very useful. When I'm doing webdev, it could be useful - and I am deploying using Docker. So why not make this AOT so I can add it to a docker build step and get all the benefit without the complications of tracing jits.

Re: Python 3.13 Gets a JIT

#98

Post by lifthrasiir »

ephimetheus wrote: post #44
est31 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Python is already fast where it matters: often, it is just used to integrate existing C/C++ libraries like numpy or pytorch. It is more an integration language than one where you write your heavy algorithms in. For JS, during the time that it received its JITs, there was no cross platform native code equivalent like wasm yet. JS had to compete with plugins written in C/C++ however. There was also competition between…

I think usually the term “browser wars” refers to the time when Netscape and Microsoft were struggling for dominance, which concluded in 2001. JavaScript JITs only emerged around 2008 with SpiderMonkey’s TraceMonkey, JavaScriptCore’s SquirrelFish Extreme, and V8’s original JIT.

There were multiple browser wars, otherwise you wouldn't need -s there ;-)

Re: Python 3.13 Gets a JIT

#99

Post by Topfi »

Akronymus wrote: post #94
bomewish wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also recall that a 50% speed improvement in SQLite was caused by 50-100 different optimisations that each eeked out 0.5-1% speedups. On phone now don’t have the ref but it all adds up.

I tried searching for that article because I vaguely recall it, but can't find it either. But yeah, a lot of small improvements add up. Reminds me of this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ5Lwzrdoe8

Here is a source for the SQLite case: https://topic.alibabacloud.com/a/sqlite-387-a-large-number-o...

Re: Python 3.13 Gets a JIT

#100

Post by fractalb »

cryptos wrote: post #6

I always wondered how Python can be one of the world's most popular languages without anyone (company) stepping up and make the runtime as fast as modern JavaScript runtimes.

I still scratch my head why it’s not installed by default on Windows.
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