[Zope-dev] Re: hasattr implementation for Zope?

[Tim Peters]

[Jim Fulton, on cell dereferencing's (lack of) speed]
> This is amazing.  Really amazing.  I stand corrected.

Well, there's no mystery if you look at LOAD_FAST and LOAD_DEREF in
ceval.c; LOAD_DEREF is slower <wink>.

The relative speed of approaches changes across Python releases too. 
For example, module global lookup benefited enormously from a long
string of "heroic optimizations" in Python's dict implementation.  I
consider a difference under 10% to be in the noise, and clawing for
one as likely to become a pessimization as to remain an optimization
under the next release; e.g., there are some obvious ways to speed
LOAD_DEREF (although I don't think anyone at present cares enough to
work on that).