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Created September 13, 2012 16:19
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Guido van Rossum's Tips for fast Python
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fast.md

Guido van Rossum11 Sep 2012 - Public

Some patterns for fast Python. Know any others?

  • Avoid overengineering datastructures. Tuples are better than objects (try namedtuple too though). Prefer simple fields over getter/setter functions.

  • Built-in datatypes are your friends. Use more numbers, strings, tuples, lists, sets, dicts. Also check out the collections library, esp. deque.

  • Be suspicious of function/method calls; creating a stack frame is expensive.

  • Don't write Java (or C++, or Javascript, ...) in Python.

  • Are you sure it's too slow? Profile before optimizing!

  • The universal speed-up is rewriting small bits of code in C. Do this only when all else fails.

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