Issue 18719: Remove a false optimization

rhettinger · rhettinger · commit b1b915c796a9 · 2013-08-13T18:16:34.000-07:00
Remove an unused early-out test from the critical path for
dict and set lookups.

When the strings already have matching lengths, kinds, and hashes,
there is no additional information gained by checking the first
characters (the probability of a mismatch is already known to
be less than 1 in 2**64).
diff --git a/Objects/stringlib/eq.h b/Objects/stringlib/eq.h
@@ -20,15 +20,6 @@ unicode_eq(PyObject *aa, PyObject *bb)
         return 1;
     if (PyUnicode_KIND(a) != PyUnicode_KIND(b))
         return 0;
-    /* Just comparing the first byte is enough to see if a and b differ.
-     * If they are 2 byte or 4 byte character most differences will happen in
-     * the lower bytes anyways.
-     */
-    if (PyUnicode_1BYTE_DATA(a)[0] != PyUnicode_1BYTE_DATA(b)[0])
-        return 0;
-    if (PyUnicode_KIND(a) == PyUnicode_1BYTE_KIND &&
-        PyUnicode_GET_LENGTH(a) == 1)
-        return 1;
     return memcmp(PyUnicode_1BYTE_DATA(a), PyUnicode_1BYTE_DATA(b),
                   PyUnicode_GET_LENGTH(a) * PyUnicode_KIND(a)) == 0;
 }
