sets with >30 elements not constant-folded in in/not in and for loops

Bug report

Bug description:

Since gh-126835 (moving constant folding from AST to CFG), set and list literals with more than 30 constant elements are no longer constant-folded in in/not in membership tests and for loop iteration. This causes the collection to be rebuilt from scratch on every evaluation instead of being stored as a compile-time constant.

For example:

import dis

# 30 elements: folded to frozenset constant
dis.dis("x in {%s}" % ", ".join(str(i) for i in range(1, 31)))
#   LOAD_NAME   x
#   LOAD_CONST  frozenset({1, 2, ..., 30})
#   CONTAINS_OP

# 31 elements: NOT folded, set rebuilt every time (BAD)
dis.dis("x in {%s}" % ", ".join(str(i) for i in range(1, 32)))
#   LOAD_NAME   x
#   BUILD_SET   0
#   LOAD_SMALL_INT 1
#   SET_ADD     1
#   ... (31 x LOAD + SET_ADD)
#   CONTAINS_OP

Using a set-membership check with a set literal with 50 elements as a microbenchmark, this manifests as a ~20x slowdown from 3.13 to 3.14:

import timeit, sys
elts = ", ".join(str(i) for i in range(50))
t = timeit.timeit(f"25 in {{{elts}}}", number=1_000_000)
print(f"25 in {{0..49}}: {t:.3f}s")

Python 3.13.13: 25 in {0..49}: 0.015s
Python 3.14.4: 25 in {0..49}: 0.291s

It also affects code object size:

for n in [30, 31, 50, 100]:
    elts = ", ".join(str(i) for i in range(1, n + 1))
    code = compile(f"x in {{{elts}}}", "<test>", "eval")
    print(f"x in {{1..{n}}}: {len(code.co_code):>5} bytes, {len(code.co_consts)} const(s)")

Python 3.13.13:

x in {1..30}:    12 bytes, 1 const(s)
x in {1..31}:    12 bytes, 1 const(s)
x in {1..50}:    12 bytes, 1 const(s)
x in {1..100}:    12 bytes, 1 const(s)

Python 3.14.4:

x in {1..30}:    12 bytes, 2 const(s)
x in {1..31}:   136 bytes, 1 const(s)
x in {1..50}:   212 bytes, 1 const(s)
x in {1..100}:   412 bytes, 1 const(s)

CPython versions tested on:

3.15, CPython main branch, 3.14

Operating systems tested on:

macOS, Linux

Linked PRs

@Eclips4

cc @Eclips4 @iritkatriel

How likely are there sets of 30+ elements that need to be stored as real constants? I can see the set of ascii letters+digits being such examples thereof or essentially unicode ranges. What would be a good cutoff here? 50? 100? 70? 52? 62? (I would say 64 just to have lower/upper case + digits)

How likely are there sets of 30+ elements that need to be stored as real constants?

I came across this because it came up in real world code :)

I ran some analyses and found at least 95 files with this pattern (with set/list literals with more than 30 elements). most were in the 30-50 elements range.

here's one example I found from numpy (with 51 elements): https://github.com/numpy/numpy/blob/388bd75829842d8230147f57eba5f86bb3ad6c3c/numpy/f2py/crackfortran.py#L253-L261

beyond that, I had a small number of hits with collections of sizes 51 to 120.

I think having 64 as a cutoff would cover most use cases. It covers alnum ranges. We can make it 256 as well just to cover the entire ASCII range (conceptually). What is the cost of having a much larger length? like, it would only slow down the bytecode generation (so negligible cost), and bump the process' memory for those constant-folded objects right?

Do you know which commit introduced this?

Do you know which commit introduced this?

a combination of 140e69c and 3618240 I believe

@picnixz

@picnixz re cutoff -- I am not knowledgeable enough to say, as I don't fully understand the tradeoffs.

based on asking Claude Code to analyze this more closely, it claims that the original behavior (AST optimizer) had no limit when constant-folding, and even now, fold_constant_intrinsic_list_to_tuple would constant-fold tuples with no size limit. the "cost" of unlimited constant-folding would be compile time, and presumably shifting such cost from runtime to compile time is almost always beneficial (and would also net a small pyc size win since a marshalled frozenset of size N would be smaller than the equivalent sequence of bytecode to dynamically construct it at runtime).

Claude Code went further and implement the optimization (fold_const_set_or_list_add, based on fold_constant_intrinsic_list_to_tuple), but given my lack of expertise in this area, I can't "own" that optimization to the level I would be comfortable making a PR based on it (I can push it to a branch in my fork if someone else might find it useful though).

I don't think we need any cutoff here, runtime performance matters much more than bytecode generation.

@itamaro

Yeah, that's certainly because of moving things from ast_opt.c to flowgraph.c. In flowgraph.c we basically use a compile-time constant _PY_STACK_USE_GUIDELINE for almost all of those optimizations, and by default it's equal to 30, so we don't optimize sequences longer than that. And yes, this was an intentional change, sorry if we forgot to mention it explicitly.

@itamaro I'd be happy to take a look at your PR =)

@Eclips4

@itamaro I'd be happy to take a look at your PR =)

@Eclips4 see itamaro@6c9b972 with the disclaimer that it's fully claude-authored. I ran it, but I didn't look at it!

Thanks Itamar!
I'll do a PR on the weekend.

FYI folks I'm going to merge #146456 to make things faster when we have long sequences with constants. Otherwise we could get bad compilation times in those cases.

@iritkatriel

PR #149016 is up. @iritkatriel @itamaro, I'd really appreciate a review and verification from you.

gh-148817: Fold long lists/sets of constant elements into constant tu…

[3.14] gh-148817: Fold long lists/sets of constant elements into cons…

[3.15] gh-148817: Fold long lists/sets of constant elements into cons…

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sets with >30 elements not constant-folded in `in`/`not in` and `for` loops #148817

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sets with >30 elements not constant-folded in in/not in and for loops #148817

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Bug report

Bug description:

CPython versions tested on:

Operating systems tested on:

Linked PRs

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itamaro commented on Apr 21, 2026

picnixz commented on Apr 21, 2026

itamaro commented on Apr 21, 2026

picnixz commented on Apr 21, 2026

iritkatriel commented on Apr 21, 2026

itamaro commented on Apr 21, 2026

itamaro commented on Apr 21, 2026

kumaraditya303 commented on Apr 22, 2026

Eclips4 commented on Apr 22, 2026

itamaro commented on Apr 22, 2026

Eclips4 commented on Apr 22, 2026

Eclips4 commented on Apr 26, 2026

Eclips4 commented on Apr 26, 2026

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sets with >30 elements not constant-folded in `in`/`not in` and `for` loops #148817