Opened 3 years ago

Last modified 8 weeks ago

#32568 new Cleanup/optimization

Prefer SafeString to mark_safe where possible — at Version 2

Reported by: Tim McCurrach Owned by: Tim McCurrach
Component: Template system Version: dev
Severity: Normal Keywords:
Cc: Triage Stage: Accepted
Has patch: no Needs documentation: no
Needs tests: no Patch needs improvement: no
Easy pickings: no UI/UX: no

Description (last modified by Tim McCurrach)

mark_safe takes roughly twice as long as simply creating a SafeString - using pyperf:

mark_safe: Mean +- std dev: 296 ns +- 12 ns
SafeString: Mean +- std dev: 158 ns +- 7 ns

There are many places in the django codebase where we know the thing we are marking as safe to be a normal (not marked as safe) string. In such cases it makes sense to use SafeString instead of mark_safe.

To play devils advocate, you could definitely argue that this is an unnecessary micro-optimisation. Following a brief search for mark_safe, there are some situations where we have something like mark_safe(X) and where evaluating X will take sufficiently long that any savings made marking the string as safe would be rendered insignificant.

Having said that, there are other places where we end up calling mark_safe a very large number of times. In such situations a small saving in time will add up to a larger saving. There are also places where we even have mark_safe("some string literal").

Furthermore, since this change is literally just replacing one word with an equally clear word, it would have no effect on complexity or readability, and so for a slight performance boost, why not?

Change History (2)

comment:1 by Tim McCurrach, 3 years ago

Owner: changed from nobody to Tim McCurrach

comment:2 by Tim McCurrach, 3 years ago

Description: modified (diff)
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