Proposed solutions

Three systems for deciding the room allocations have been proposed, and one has been rejected:

• Randomly assign choosing priority: this was dismissed because the person with the last priority inevitably feels "stuck with" a room.
• Entirely random: we take four playing cards from a deck, associate each card with a room, shuffle the cards until everybody is satisfied, then deal each person a card. That’s the room that they get. Everybody is equally "stuck with" a room, and not due to the actions of any other person.
• Bidding system: the auction would move from perceived-most-valuable-room to perceived-least-valuable-room. Bidding starts with the master bedroom at the evenly-divided rental rate. Once a winner/price is determined for that room, the process is repeated for the room with the half-bathroom, with a newly-divided rental rate. Once a point is reached where nobody is willing to place a bid on a room, the rest are assigned at random. Each person, through their own decision to bid or not to bid, ends up with the room of their choosing.

I’m personally a fan of the simplicity and total lack of competition in the random system, but if the bidding system is more likely to lead to the optimal outcome, it must be considered! (Of course, care must be taken to address possible social ramifications.)

During casual discussion we noted that the bidding system would be strategically interesting. If a person were not really interested in getting a high-value room but didn’t care all that much if they did, it is clearly in their favor to drive bids on the early rooms as high as possible — this would entail a decrease in the payment rate for a later room.

I perused the Wikipedia entry on auction theory and realize that we were assuming an open/ascending bid auction, but a first-price/sealed-bid auction might be less socially stressful. [†] My main fear is that open bidding would get carried away (it’s exciting, after all) and participants would come to regret their bids.

In any case, it’s an interesting problem I thought I would share. Suggestions are welcome; otherwise, I’ll write a follow-up entry as to how it turns out.

Footnotes

The dream

The feature that languages should offer is a mux/demux service: mux an infinite number of formatting preferences into an AST (via a traditional parser); demux the AST into source text via an AST-decompiler, parameterized by an arbitrarily large set of formatting options. Language implementations could ship with a pair of standalone binaries. Seriously, the reference language implementation should understand its own formatting parameters at least as well as Eclipse does. [§]

Once you have the demux tool, you run it on your AST files as a post-checkout hook in your revision control system for instant style personalization. If the engine accepts the AST directly as input, you would only need to demux the files you planned to work on — if the engine accepted an AST directly as input in lieu of source text, this could even be an optimization.

Different execution engines are likely to use different ASTs, but there should be little problem with composability: checked-in AST goes through standalone demux with an arbitrary set of preferences, then through the alternate compiler’s mux. So long as the engines have the same language grammar for the source text, everybody’s happy, and you don’t have to waste time writing silly AST-to-AST-prime transforms.

In this model, linters are just composable AST observers/transforms that have no ordering dependencies. You could even offer a service for simple grammatical extensions without going so far as language level support. Want a block-end delimiter in the Python code you look at? [¶] Why not, just use a transform to rip it out before it leaves the front-end of the execution engine.

Reality

Of course, the set of languages we know and love has some overlap with the set of languages that totally suck to parse, whether due to preprocessors or context sensitivity or the desire to parse poems, but I would bet good money that there are solutions for such languages. In any case, the symmetric difference between those two sets could get with it, and new languages would be kind to follow suit. It would certainly be an interesting post-FF4 experiment for SpiderMonkey, as we’ve got a plan on file to clean up the parser interfaces for an intriguing ECMAScript strawman proposal anywho.

Footnotes

2. ?

Follow these simple steps to steal my idea:

0. Assume that the aforementioned code retreat process is awesome.
1. Make a bed-and-breakfast in the outskirts of a city that’s attractive to programmers (for whatever reason).
2. Offer retreats with high-speed internet access, offices with whiteboards, mirra chairs, height-adjustable desks, pay-as-you-go phone conference equipment, high-res DLP projectors, disco balls, whatever. Make it clearly "the works". If you want to go even further, mount speakers and sound-proof the walls. [§]
3. Make the experience as luxurious and classy as reasonably possible so that the programmers respect the "sanctity" of the retreat: chef-prepared meals, an indisputably good coffee machine, a Z80 prominently featured as a piece of wall art, and a complimentary bag-o-munchy-chips regimen. Beautiful scenery in which one can walk and think would definitely be a plus, and proximity to a nerd-friendly bar never hurt a nerdy establishment either.

The patrons have a good degree of flexibility as a result of this setup. They might hole themselves away in offices 95% of the time, emerging only to sleep, gather delicious food, and scuttle back into their offices. Alternatively, if they’re on a more casual endeavor (coding vacation?), they might choose to strike up conversations with people at meals and go out to see the sites.

3. Profit!

Please do steal my idea and make a lot of money for yourself (share it with no one!) — I only ask that you offer me a free stay once you get off the ground.

I’ll leave you off with a little marketing campaign idea:

B&B++: universally evaluated as the way to B, and, after each bed and breakfast, we get a little bit better. Until we overflow. [¶]

Footnotes

How it starts

At some point in a company’s growth, management notices that there is a lot of sub-par, [†] redundant, and distributed tool development going on. Employees have been manufacturing quick-and-dirty tools in order to perform their jobs more efficiently.

Management then ponders the benefit of centralizing that tool development. It seems like an easy sell:

• Help ensure ongoing productivity gains — mission-critical tools that stop working or contain heinous bugs are a hidden liability
• Foster tool developer expertise on a specialized team
• Eliminate needless repetition by creating shared code bases and consolidating infrastructure resources

Good management will also consider the negative repercussions of turning distributed and independent resources into a shared and centrally managed resource:

• Everybody wants a slice of the tool pie, because tools make our life better, and there always seems to be some stupid crap to automate.
• Everybody wants a piece of the compute resources, because more compute makes parallelizable analyses go faster.
• If you build it, they will come.

How I’ve seen it work (warning: depressing, hyperbolic)

1. A group at the company makes a strong enough case to the centralized-tool-management machinery — a request for tool development is granted.

2. A series of inevitably painful meetings are scheduled where the customer dictates their requirements, after which the tool team either rejects them or misunderstands/mis-prioritizes them because: a) that’s not how it works — they have to actively gather the requirements, and b) they don’t have enough time to do all the silly little things that the customer wants.

   Because people are fighting each other to get what they want, everybody forgets that the customers haven’t really described the problem domain in any relevant detail.

3. The tool team developers are happy to go code in peace, without going back for more painful meetings. They create a tool according to their understanding of the requirements during the first iteration.

4. The customer has no idea how the tool team came up with a product that was nothing like their expectation. They say something overly dramatic like, “it’s all wrong,” pissing off the tool team, and lose faith in the ability of the tool team to deliver the product they want.

5. The customer goes back to doing it manually or continue to develop their own tools, expecting that the tool team will fail.

6. The tool team fails because the customer lost interest in telling them what they actually needed and giving good feedback. It wasn’t the tool that anybody was looking for because the process doomed it from the start.

I say that this scenario is depressing because tool teams exist to make life better for everybody — they enjoy writing software that makes your life easier. Working with a tool team should not be painful. You should want to jump for joy when you start working with them and take them out to beers when you’re finished working with them, because they’re just that good. I think that, by taking a less traditional approach, you will be able to achieve much better results…

How it should work

1. A group at the company makes a strong enough case to the centralized-tool-management machinery — a request for tool development is granted.
2. A small handful of tool team operatives [‡], probably around two or three people, split off from the rest of the tool team and are placed in the company hierarchy under the team of the customers. They sit the customers’ cube farm, go to their meetings to listen (but no laptops!), etc., just like a typical team member would.
3. The customer team brings the operatives up to speed on the automatable task that must be performed each day through immersion. Depending on the frequency, breadth, and duration of the manual processes, the operatives must perform this manual process somewhere on the scale from weeks to months, until they develop a full understanding of the variety of manual processes that must be performed. [§] All operatives should be 100% assigned to the manual tasks for this duration, temporarily offloading members of customer team after their ramp-up.
4. Bam! With an unquestionably solid understanding of the problem domain, the tool team sleeper cells activate. 80% of the manual task load is transitioned off of the operatives so that they can begin development work. Agile-style iterations of 1-2 weeks should be used.
5. After each iteration there must be a usable product (by definition of an iteration). As a result of this, a percentage of the manual task load is shifted back onto the operatives each iteration, augmenting the original 20%. If the tool is actually developing properly, the operatives will be able to cope with the increased load over time.
6. As the feature set begins to stabilize or the manual task load approaches zero (because it has all been automated), the product is released to the customers for feedback and a limited amount of future-proofing is considered for final iterations.
7. Most customer feedback is ignored, but a small and reasonable subset is acted on. If the operatives were able to make do with the full task load plus development, it’s probably a lot better than it used to be, and the customer is just getting greedy.
8. The customer takes the operatives out for beers, since the tool team saved them a crapload of time and accounted for all the issues in the problem domain.
9. A single operative hangs back with the customer for a few more iterations to eyeball maintenance concerns and maybe do a little more future-proofing while the rest head back to the tool team. The one who hangs back gets some kind of special reward for being a team player.

Conclusion

In the sleeper cell approach, the operatives have a clear understanding of what’s important through first hand knowledge and experience and, consequently, know the ways in which the software has to be flexible. It emulates the way that organic tool development is found in the wild, as described in the introductory paragraph, but puts the task of creating the actual tool in the hands of experienced tool developers (our operatives!).

I think it’s also noteworthy that this approach adheres to a reasonable principle: to write a good program to automate a task, you have to know/understand the variety of ways in which you might perform that task by hand, across all the likely variables.

The operatives are forced to live with the fruits of their labor; i.e. a defect like slow load times will be more painful for them, because they have to work with their tool regularly and take on larger workloads on an ongoing basis, before developers can ever get their hands on it.

Notice that there’s still the benefit through centralization of tool developers: central contact point for tool needs, cultivating expertise in developers, knowledge of shared code base, understanding of infrastructure and contact points for infrastructural resource needs; however, you avoid the weird customer disconnect that comes with time slicing a traditional tool team.

Tools developers may also find that they enjoy the team that they’re working in so much that they request to stay on that team! How awesome of a pitch is that to new hires? “Do you have a strong background in software development? Work closely with established software experts, make connections to people who will love you when you’re done awesome-ing their lives, and take a whirlwind tour of the company within one year.”

Footnotes

Background

Lately, I’ve been doing a little work on closure optimization, as permitted by static analysis; i.e. the parser/compiler marks which functions can be optimized into various closure forms.

In a language that permits nested functions and functions as first-class values, there are a few things you need to ask about each function before you optimize it:

• Can it escape (leave the scope it’s defined in)?
• Does it refer to free variables (identifiers declared outside the function definition)?
• Are the free variables it refers to potentially redefined after the function definition?

Function escape (the funarg problem)

If a function can execute outside the scope in which it was lexically defined, it is said to be a "funarg", a fancy word for "potentially escaping outside the scope where it’s defined". We call certain functions in the JS runtime Algol-like closures if they are immediately applied function expressions, like so:

function outer() {
    var x = 12;
    return (function cubeX() { return x * x * x; })();
}

The function cubeX can never execute outside the confines of outer — there’s no way for the function definition to escape. It’s as if you just took the expression x * x * x, wrapped it in a lambda (function expression), and immediately executed that expression. [†]

Apparently a lot of Algol programmers had the hots for this kinda thing — the whole function-wrapping thing was totally optional, but you chose to do it, Algol programmers, and we respect your choice.

You can optimize this case through static analysis. As long as there’s no possibility of escape between a declaration and its use in a nested function, the nested function knows exactly how far to reach up the stack to retrieve/manipulate the variable — the activation record stack is totally determined at compile time. Because there’s no escaping, there’s not even any need to import the upvar into the Algol-like function.

Level 0: &outerStackFrame
Level 1: NULL
Level 2: NULL
...

Level 0: &outerStackFrame
Level 1: &cubeX
Level 2: NULL
...

function outer() {
    var x = 24;
    function innerFirst() { return x; }
    function innerSecond() {
        var x = 42;
        return innerFirst();
    }
    return innerSecond();
}

Level 0: &outerStackFrame
Level 1: &innerSecond
Level 2: NULL
...

Level 0: &outerStackFrame
Level 1: &innerFirst (encapsulates &innerSecond)
Level 2: NULL
...

Free variable references

Because JS is a lexically scoped language [¶] we can determine which enclosing scope a free variable is defined in. [#] If a function’s free variables only refer to bindings in the global scope, then it doesn’t need any information from the functions that enclose it. For these functions the set of free variables in nested functions is the null set, so we call it a null closure. Top-level functions are null closures. [♠]

function outer() {
    return function cube(x) { return x * x * x; }; // Null closure - no upvars.
}

Free variables are termed upvars, since they are identifiers that refer to variables in higher (enclosing) scopes. At parse time, when we’re trying to find a declaration to match up with a use, they’re called unresolved lexical dependencies. Though JavaScript scopes are less volatile — and, as some will undoubtedly point out, less flexible — I believe that the name upvar comes from this construct in Tcl, which lets you inject vars into and read vars from arbitrary scopes as determined by the runtime call stack: [♥]

set x 7
 
proc most_outer {} {
    proc outer {} {
        set x 24
        proc upvar_setter {level} {
            upvar $level x x
            set x 42
        }
        proc upvar_printer {level} {
            upvar $level x x
            puts $x
        }
        upvar_printer 1
        upvar_setter 1
        upvar_printer 1
        upvar_setter 2
        upvar_printer 2
        upvar_printer 3
        upvar_setter 3
        upvar_printer 3
    }
    outer
}
most_outer # Yields the numbers 24, 42, 42, 7, and 42.

Upvar redefinitions

If you know that the upvar is never redefined after the nested function is created, it is effectively immutable — similar to the effect of Java’s partial closures in anonymous inner classes via the final keyword. In this case, you can create an optimized closure in a form we call a flat closure — if, during static analysis, you find that none of the upvars are redefined after the function definition, you can import the upvars into the closure, effectively copying the immutable jsvals into extra function slots.

On the other hand, if variables in enclosing scopes are (re)defined after the function definition (and thus, don’t appear immutable to the function), a shared environment object has to be created so that nested functions can correctly see when the updates to the jsvals occur. Take the following example:

function outer() {
    var communicationChannel = 24;
    function innerGetter() {
        return communicationChannel();
    }
    function innerSetter() {
        communicationChannel = 42;
    }
    return [innerGetter, innerSetter];
}

Closing over references

In this case, outer must create an environment record outside of the stack so that when innerGetter and innerSetter escape on return, they can see both communicate through the upvar. This is the nice encapsulation-effect you can get through closure-by-reference, and is often used in the JS "constructor-pattern", like so:

function MooCow() {
    var hasBell = false;
    var noise = "Moo.";
    return {
        pontificate: function() { return hasBell? noise + " <GONG!>" : noise; }
        giveBell: function() { hasBell = true; }
    };
}

It’s interesting to note that all the languages I work with these days perform closure-by-reference, as opposed to closure-by-value. In constrast, closure-by-value would snapshot all identifiers in the enclosing scope, so immutable types (strings, numbers) would be impossible to change.

Sometimes, closure-by-reference can produce side effects that surprise developers, such as:

def surprise():
    funs = [lambda: x ** 2 for x in range(6)]
    assert funs[0]() == 25

This occurs because x is bound in function-local scope, and all the lambdas close over it by reference. When x is mutated in further iterations of the list comprehension (at least in Python 2.x), the lambdas are closed over the environment record of surprise, and all of them see the last value that x was updated to.

I can sympathize. In fact, I’ve wrote a program to do so:

var lambdas = [];
var condolences = ["You're totally right",
        "and I understand what you're coming from, but",
        "this is how closures work nowadays"];
for (var i = 0; i < condolences.length; i++) {
    var condolence = condolences[i];
    lambdas.push(function() { return condolence; });
}
print(lambdas[0]());

Keep in mind that var delcarations are hoisted to function scope in JS.

I implore you to note that comments will most likely be received while I’m sober.

Footnotes

Goals

I always feel stupid writing down goals — they seem so self-evident; however, it helps to put the work I’m doing into perspective and gives me something that I can to refer back to.

I’m also a big believer in the effectiveness of public accountability, so publishing those goals seems prudent — my notes from the JS pit are poised to help me stay motivated more than anything else.

My goals are to:

• Do my part to meet and exceed performance targets in the JS engine. It’s an exciting time with lots of healthy competition to motivate this.
• Immerse myself in language design concepts and seek out important implementation details, even if those details don’t pertain to something that I’m working on directly. This also entails some independent research and small projects to gain better understanding of foreign language concepts.
• Deliberately take time to think constructively about alternative or innovative ways to accomplish our language goals. Taking things at face value as "the way we’ve always done it" is the way that innovative things get overlooked — this is relatively easy to do with a pair of fresh eyes, but similarly difficult because you’re the team noob.

Working with compiler engineers from diverse language backgrounds, it’s prime time for sucking knowledge out of people’s heads, comparing and contrasting it, and listening to them argue with each other. Heck, just look at the concepts behind JS: an imperative, Scheme-inspired, prototypal, C-and-Java-syntax conforming language that’s irrevocably tied to a practical platform, the web. It’s bound to be a fun ride.

From start to present

I started off implementing the simpler opcodes for JaegerMonkey (JM) and getting an understanding the JM code base. Not too long into it, I was told that looking into quick-and-easy parser optimizations was a priority — somebody had reported that a significant fraction of the GMail load bar time could be attributed to JS parsing. [*]

Now, JavaScript isn’t the easiest language in the world to parse; for example, automatic semicolon insertion creates some non-traditional obstacles for generated shift/reduce parsers [†] — it effectively makes an error correction algorithm part of the normal parse procedure. The details are for another entry, but suffice it to say that our recursive descent parser code gets complex, especially due to our E4X support and some of the static analyses we perform for optimizations before bytecode emission.

In pursuing JS parser optimization I assembled a suite of parsing benchmarks from sites on the web with "large" JS payloads — I call this suite parsemark. After getting some speedups from simple inlining, I attempted a somewhat fundamental change to the parser to reduce the number of branch mispredictions, in converting it to always have a token "pre-lexed" as opposed to the prior "lex-on-demand" model. Roughly, this required adding a "there’s always a lexed token" invariant to the lexer and hoisting lexer calls/modesets from substitution rules into their referring nonterminals in the parser. The details for this are also entry fodder. Sadly, it demonstrated negligible performance gains for the increase in complexity. Sure taught me a lot about our parser, though.

The biggest performance win was obtained through a basic fix to our parser arena-allocation chunk sizing. sayrer noticed that a surprising amount of time was being spent in kernel space, so we tracked the issue down. It was frustrating to work for a few weeks on a fundamental change and then realize that multiplying a constant by four can get you a 20% parsing speedup, but I’ve certainly learned to look a lot more closely at the vmem subsystem when things are slow. I have some speedup statistics and a comparison to V8 (with all its lazy parsing and parse-caching bits ripped out), but I don’t have much faith that my environment hasn’t changed in the course of all the historical data measurements — writing a script to verify speedup over changesets seems like a viable option for future notes.

In the miscellany department, I’ve been trying to do a good amount of work fixing broken windows via cleanup patches. I’m finding it difficult to strike a balance here, since there’s a lot of modularity-breaking interdependencies in the code base — what appear to be simple cleanups tend to unravel into large patches that get stale easily. However, cleanup does force you to read through the code you’re modifying, which is always good when you’re learning a new code base.

Looking back on it, it doesn’t seem like a lot of work; of course, my hope is that the time I spend up-front getting accustomed to the codebase will let me make progress on my goals more rapidly.

Stay tuned for more JS pittage — unpredictable time, but predictable channel.

Footnotes

Efficiency of the more common usage

Let’s look at the efficiency of list comprehensions in the more common usage, where the comprehension’s list result is actually relevant (or, in compiler-speak, live-out).

Using the following program, you can see the time spent in each implementation and the corresponding bytecode sequence:

import dis
import inspect
import timeit
 
 
programs = dict(
    loop="""
result = []
for i in range(20):
    result.append(i * 2)
""",
   loop_faster="""
result = []
add = result.append
for i in range(20):
    add(i * 2)
""",
    comprehension='result = [i * 2 for i in range(20)]',
)
 
 
for name, text in programs.iteritems():
    print name, timeit.Timer(stmt=text).timeit()
    code = compile(text, '<string>', 'exec')
    dis.disassemble(code)

loop 11.1495118141
  2           0 BUILD_LIST               0
              3 STORE_NAME               0 (result)
 
  3           6 SETUP_LOOP              37 (to 46)
              9 LOAD_NAME                1 (range)
             12 LOAD_CONST               0 (20)
             15 CALL_FUNCTION            1
             18 GET_ITER
        >>   19 FOR_ITER                23 (to 45)
             22 STORE_NAME               2 (i)
 
  4          25 LOAD_NAME                0 (result)
             28 LOAD_ATTR                3 (append)
             31 LOAD_NAME                2 (i)
             34 LOAD_CONST               1 (2)
             37 BINARY_MULTIPLY
             38 CALL_FUNCTION            1
             41 POP_TOP
             42 JUMP_ABSOLUTE           19
        >>   45 POP_BLOCK
        >>   46 LOAD_CONST               2 (None)
             49 RETURN_VALUE
loop_faster 8.36096310616
  2           0 BUILD_LIST               0
              3 STORE_NAME               0 (result)
 
  3           6 LOAD_NAME                0 (result)
              9 LOAD_ATTR                1 (append)
             12 STORE_NAME               2 (add)
 
  4          15 SETUP_LOOP              34 (to 52)
             18 LOAD_NAME                3 (range)
             21 LOAD_CONST               0 (20)
             24 CALL_FUNCTION            1
             27 GET_ITER
        >>   28 FOR_ITER                20 (to 51)
             31 STORE_NAME               4 (i)
 
  5          34 LOAD_NAME                2 (add)
             37 LOAD_NAME                4 (i)
             40 LOAD_CONST               1 (2)
             43 BINARY_MULTIPLY
             44 CALL_FUNCTION            1
             47 POP_TOP
             48 JUMP_ABSOLUTE           28
        >>   51 POP_BLOCK
        >>   52 LOAD_CONST               2 (None)
             55 RETURN_VALUE
comprehension 7.08145213127
  1           0 BUILD_LIST               0
              3 DUP_TOP
              4 STORE_NAME               0 (_[1])
              7 LOAD_NAME                1 (range)
             10 LOAD_CONST               0 (20)
             13 CALL_FUNCTION            1
             16 GET_ITER
        >>   17 FOR_ITER                17 (to 37)
             20 STORE_NAME               2 (i)
             23 LOAD_NAME                0 (_[1])
             26 LOAD_NAME                2 (i)
             29 LOAD_CONST               1 (2)
             32 BINARY_MULTIPLY
             33 LIST_APPEND
             34 JUMP_ABSOLUTE           17
        >>   37 DELETE_NAME              0 (_[1])
             40 STORE_NAME               3 (result)
             43 LOAD_CONST               2 (None)
             46 RETURN_VALUE

List comprehensions perform better here because you don’t need to load the append attribute off of the list (loop program, bytecode 28) and call it as a function (loop program, bytecode 38). Instead, in a comprehension, a specialized LIST_APPEND bytecode is generated for a fast append onto the result list (comprehension program, bytecode 33).

In the loop_faster program, you avoid the overhead of the append attribute lookup by hoisting it out of the loop and placing the result in a fastlocal (bytecode 9-12), so it loops more quickly; however, the comprehension uses a specialized LIST_APPEND bytecode instead of incurring the overhead of a function call, so it still trumps.

Using list comprehensions for side effects

I want to address a point that was brought up in the previous entry as to the efficiency of for loops versus list comprehensions when used purely for side effects, but I’ll discuss the subjective bit first, since that’s the least sciency part.

def loop():
    accum = []
    for i in range(20):
        accum.append(i)
    return accum
 
 
def comprehension():
    accum = []
    [accum.append(i) for i in range(20)]
    return accum

2           0 BUILD_LIST               0
            3 STORE_FAST               0 (accum)
 
3           6 SETUP_LOOP              33 (to 42)
            9 LOAD_GLOBAL              0 (range)
           12 LOAD_CONST               1 (20)
           15 CALL_FUNCTION            1
           18 GET_ITER
      >>   19 FOR_ITER                19 (to 41)
           22 STORE_FAST               1 (i)
 
4          25 LOAD_FAST                0 (accum)
           28 LOAD_ATTR                1 (append)
           31 LOAD_FAST                1 (i)
           34 CALL_FUNCTION            1
           37 POP_TOP
           38 JUMP_ABSOLUTE           19
      >>   41 POP_BLOCK
 
5     >>   42 LOAD_FAST                0 (accum)
           45 RETURN_VALUE

2           0 BUILD_LIST               0
            3 STORE_FAST               0 (accum)
 
3           6 BUILD_LIST               0
            9 DUP_TOP
           10 STORE_FAST               1 (_[1])
           13 LOAD_GLOBAL              0 (range)
           16 LOAD_CONST               1 (20)
           19 CALL_FUNCTION            1
           22 GET_ITER
      >>   23 FOR_ITER                22 (to 48)
           26 STORE_FAST               2 (i)
           29 LOAD_FAST                1 (_[1])
           32 LOAD_FAST                0 (accum)
           35 LOAD_ATTR                1 (append)
           38 LOAD_FAST                2 (i)
           41 CALL_FUNCTION            1
           44 LIST_APPEND
           45 JUMP_ABSOLUTE           23
      >>   48 DELETE_FAST              1 (_[1])
           51 POP_TOP
 
4          52 LOAD_FAST                0 (accum)
           55 RETURN_VALUE

What is a list comprehension?

A list comprehension is a special brackety syntax to perform a transform operation with an optional filter clause that always produces a new sequence (list) object as a result. To break it down visually, you perform:

new_range = [i * i          for i in range(5)   if i % 2 == 0]

Which corresponds to:

*result*  = [*transform*    *iteration*         *filter*     ]

The filter piece answers the question, "should this item be transformed?" If the answer is yes, then the transform piece is evaluated and becomes an element in the result. The iteration [*] order is preserved in the result.

Go ahead and figure out what you expect new_range to be in the prior example. You can double check me in the Python shell, but I think it comes out to be:

>>> new_range = [i * i for i in range(5) if i % 2 == 0]
>>> print new_range
[0, 4, 16]

If it still isn’t clicking, we can try to make the example less noisy by getting rid of the transform and filter — can you tell what this will produce?

>>> new_range = [i for i in range(5)]

So what’s wrong with that first snippet?

As we observed in the previous section, a list comprehension always produces a result list, where the elements of the result list are the transformed elements of the iteration. That means, if there’s no filter piece, there are exactly as many result elements as there were iteration elements.

Weird thing number one about the snippet — the list comprehension result is unused. It’s created, mind you — list comprehension always create a value, even if you don’t care what it is — but it just goes off to oblivion. (In technical terms, it becomes garbage.) When you don’t need the result, just use a for loop! This is better:

def colapse(seq):
    """Preserve order."""
    uniq = []
    for item in seq:
        if not uniq.count(item):
            uniq.append(item)
    return uniq

It’s two more lines, but it’s less weird looking and wasteful. "Better for everybody who reads and runs your code," means you should do it.

Moral of the story: a list comprehension isn’t just, "shorthand for a loop." It’s shorthand for a transform from an input sequence to an output sequence with an optional filter. If it gets too complex or weird looking, just make a loop. It’s not that hard and readers of your code will thank you.

Weird thing number two: the transform, list.append(item), produces None as its output value, because the return value from list.append is always None. Therefore, the result, even though it isn’t kept anywhere, is a list of None values of the same length as seq (notice that there’s no filter clause).

Weird thing number three: list.count(item) iterates over every element in the list looking for things that == to item. If you think through the case where you call collapse on an entirely unique sequence, you can tell that the collapse algorithm is O(n²). In fact, it’s even worse than it may seem at first glance, because count will keep going all the way to the end of uniq, even if it finds item in the first index of uniq. What the original author really wanted was item not in uniq, which bails out early if it finds item in uniq.

Also worth mentioning for the computer-sciency folk playing along at home: if all elements of the sequence are comparable, you can bring that down to O(n * log n) by using a "shadow" sorted sequence and bisecting to test for membership. If the sequence is hashable you can bring it down to O(n), perhaps by using the set datatype if you are in Python >= 2.3. Note that the common cases of strings, numbers, and tuples (any built-in immutable datatype, for that matter) are hashable.

From Python history

It’s interesting to note that Python Enhancement Proposal (PEP) #270 considered putting a uniq function into the language distribution, but withdrew it with the following statement:

Removing duplicate elements from a list is a common task, but there are only two reasons I can see for making it a built-in. The first is if it could be done much faster, which isn’t the case. The second is if it makes it significantly easier to write code. The introduction of sets.py eliminates this situation since creating a sequence without duplicates is just a matter of choosing a different data structure: a set instead of a list.

Remember that sets can only contain hashable elements (same policy as dictionary keys) and are therefore not suitable for all uniq-ifying tasks, as mentioned in the last paragraph of the previous section.

Footnotes