I appreciate the large amount of info. Great answer. It just doesn’t make sense to me, all things being equal (including performant algorithms), why choose Python and then make a small performance tweak like in the article? I understand preferring the faster implementation, but it seems to me like waxing your car to reduce wind resistance to make it go faster, when installing a turbo-charger would be much more effective.
I think a better analogy would be that you’re tuning your bike for better performance because the trade-offs of switching to a car are worse than keeping the bike.
If you use the profiler and see that the slower operation is being used frequently, and is taking up a chunk of time deemed significant, why not swap it to the faster version?
In a simulation I’m working on that goes through 42 million rounds I spent some time profiling and going through the code that was eating up a lot of time (especially things executed all 42 million times) and trying to find some optimizations. Brought the run time down from about 10 minutes to 5 minutes.
I certainly wasn’t going to start over in C++ or Rust, and if I’d started with either of those languages I would have missed out on a lot of really strong Python libraries and probably spent more time coding rather than refining the simulation.
I appreciate the large amount of info. Great answer. It just doesn’t make sense to me, all things being equal (including performant algorithms), why choose Python and then make a small performance tweak like in the article? I understand preferring the faster implementation, but it seems to me like waxing your car to reduce wind resistance to make it go faster, when installing a turbo-charger would be much more effective.
I think a better analogy would be that you’re tuning your bike for better performance because the trade-offs of switching to a car are worse than keeping the bike.
Ok… I’ll buy that
Good, more people should buy bicycles
If you use the profiler and see that the slower operation is being used frequently, and is taking up a chunk of time deemed significant, why not swap it to the faster version?
In a simulation I’m working on that goes through 42 million rounds I spent some time profiling and going through the code that was eating up a lot of time (especially things executed all 42 million times) and trying to find some optimizations. Brought the run time down from about 10 minutes to 5 minutes.
I certainly wasn’t going to start over in C++ or Rust, and if I’d started with either of those languages I would have missed out on a lot of really strong Python libraries and probably spent more time coding rather than refining the simulation.