[IMP-dev] Moving runtime checks to python

[Daniel Russel <>]

Unscientific profiling suggests that my IMP code is spending much of  
it time in check code, specifically checking that a particle contains  
a given attribute when fetching or setting its value. This check is  
not needed in C++ code that is not currently being debugged and it is  
extremely hard for the compiler to prove they are not needed. So I  
think the right solution is probably to replace the IMP_check in the C+ 
+ code with an IMP_assert and wrap the methods with python code which  
checks that the attribute is there and throws an exception if it is  
not. There are probably a few other places like get_particle where  
this is also the case, but they don't seem to be bottlenecks at this  
point. Any thoughts?