Python 3.7+ 保證 dict 內容的順序

在「Dicts are now ordered, get used to it」這邊看到的,因為 Python 官方 (也就是 CPython) 實做 dict 的方式改變,然後決定把這個特性當作是 social contract,而不是當作 side effect 的特性 (也就是不保證之後版本會有相同特性)。

Changed in version 3.7: Dictionary order is guaranteed to be insertion order. This behavior was an implementation detail of CPython from 3.6.

作者裡面的兩張圖清楚表示出來以前的版本怎麼實做,與 3.7+ 的版本怎麼實做:

這樣就很好理解了。

不過考慮到還是有些系統用 Python 3.5 (像是 Ubuntu 16.04 內建的 python3) 與 Python 3.6 (Ubuntu 18.04 內建的 python3,雖然沒問題,但當時還沒有寫出來),也許還是先不要依賴這個行為會比較好。

不過以插入的順序列出好像不是很常用到...

Python 3.6 對 Dict 的改善

Python 3 的 Dict 將會有重大的改變:「[Python-Dev] Python 3.6 dict becomes compact and gets a private version; and keywords become ordered」。

在 3.5 時:

Python 3.5.1 (default, Jun 20 2016, 14:48:22)
>>> def func(**kw): print(kw.keys())
...
>>> func(a=1, b=2, c=3, d=4, e=5)
dict_keys(['c', 'd', 'e', 'b', 'a'])   # random order

對上目前還在開發的 3.6:

Python 3.6.0a4+ (default:d43f819caea7, Sep  8 2016, 13:05:34)
>>> def func(**kw): print(kw.keys())
...
>>> func(a=1, b=2, c=3, d=4, e=5)
dict_keys(['a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e'])   # expected order

在「Compact and ordered dict」這邊可以看到記憶體的使用量降低:

It seems like the memory usage is between 20% and 25% smaller. Great job!

Memory usage, Python 3.5 => Python 3.6 on Linux x86_64:

./python -c 'import sys; print(sys.getsizeof({str(i):i for i in range(10)}))'

* 10 items: 480 B => 384 B (-20%)
* 100 items: 6240 B => 4720 B (-24%)
* 1000 items: 49248 B => 36984 B (-25%)

Note: the size is the the size of the container itself, not of keys nor values.

不過效能上似乎慢了一些:

3% slowdown in microbench is not surprising.
Compact dict introduces one additional indirection.

Instead, I've added freelist for most compact PyDictKeys.
So I think overall performance is almost same to before compact dict.

不過也有人提到應該拿 3.5 + patch 測,而不是直接拿 3.6 測:

There are a lot of other changes in interpreter core between 3.5 and 3.5 (such as new bytecode and optimized function calls). Could you compare the performance between the version just before adding new dict implementation and the version just after this?

看起來後續還在進行中...