In my application (with a deeply nested hierarchy of templates), this patch provides a 20% and up improvement to compile times by caching pattern lists, and speeding up restriction checks. Testing speed against the included tests provides a more modest 5% speedup.

Thanks. I made a few changes and brought that from ~20% to ~28% faster.

Testing performance using crunner.py isn't really accurate so I used this line with a large, representative template (73K, 1600 lines, 5700 words, 20k tokens).

spitfire-trunk-speedy> time scripts/spitfire-compile -O3 -X no-use-dependency-analysis test.spt test.spt test.spt test.spt test.spt test.spt test.spt test.spt test.spt test.spt WARNING: unable to import psyco

real 0m5.426s user 0m5.270s sys 0m0.143s