Comment 12 for bug 303232

Interesting results, but I guess we would not expect to see much of a performance increase by building python with hardware floating-point. It's an interpreter, so I expect that floating-point instructions are going to account for only a small proportion of the code executed, even when the python program being executed by the interpreter is doing some floating-point number-crunching.

If you can post the XScale results then that would be interesting: this would give a good indication of how the performance of general-purpose code will be affected when running code built with the proposed options on ARM9 platforms.

To get a better idea of the effect of building specific components for VFP, a package which does a lot of heavy floating point internally would be more interesting--- if we can obtain benchmarks for some backend libraries such as the following, this may give us a better overall idea what performance improvements would be possible by building VFP-enabled versions of some components:
    freetype
    pango
    cairo
    media backends (not so sure here, but maybe, but possibly libraries such as ffmpeg, vorbis, fftw)
    spidermonkey JavaScript engine (http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/js/)

I haven't looked into these in detail yet.