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How fast can the RPython GC allocate?

While working on a paper about allocation profiling in VMProf I got curious about how quickly the RPython GC can allocate an object. I wrote a small RPython benchmark program to get an idea of the ord

This is not a fair comparison, because the Boehm GC uses conservative stack scanning, therefore it cannot move objects, which requires much more complicated allocation. However, an instance of a user-defined class in regular Python when run on PyPy is actually a much larger object, due to dynamic typing. Indeed, when we ran the same code on my colleague's two-year-old AMD, we got quite a bit worse results, so a lot of the speed seems to be due to the hard work of CPU architects.

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