Pythons -O flag makes an insane difference about pywasm

[mohanson]

Thank you for your discovery. I have noticed the execution efficiency of pywasm. It spends a lot of time on https://github.com/mohanson/pywasm/blob/master/pywasm/execution.py#L18, because every time it access any value, it always need to regenerate the python object (int/float) from the byte(s).

The current performance of pywasm is not particularly good, I will try to optimize this part of the code.

[mohanson]

I recently started learning chess (because of The Queen's Gambit

Maybe I will participate :)

[mohanson]

I fixed the side effects of assertion in pywasm==1.0.7, and at the same time improved the performance (about ~10%). I think I have a chance to double the running speed, but I need to think more (that is, not in this version).

-O won't break the program anymore.

[void4]

That would be great! I'm using pywasm now to run the chess tournaments between programs (see here: https://rlc-chess.com/competitions :) (site takes a bit too load, but this is due to the frontend code, not pywasm in this case))

[void4]

I definitely want to create more experiments like this, say, let people write their own simple routing algorithms and see which one is the most resource-effective one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8MvSAZ-YMk (https://github.com/void4/netsim)

For this I used Stackless Python because it supports suspending programs (and resuming them!) after some number of instruction steps: https://stackless.readthedocs.io/en/latest/library/stackless/pickling.html But Python cannot safely run untrusted programs, which is why WebAssembly would be a great target again.

With pywasm running faster, these kinds of projects will be much more feasible.

[mohanson]

Ah, looking through the pywasm code it seems that the asserts have side effects, that are necessary for it to be executed correctly.

It is not a good habit to produce side effects in assertions, so I will remove it, thanks.