Pro-tip: Write Python like Python

My last post accused Python of being The Slow of the Internet, not because Python is bad but because bad Python is awful.

In many cases, Python is really not slow for the reasons you think it is

Python is a great glue language, a terrific scripting language, because it provides fantastic facilities for manipulating bulky amounts of data. The terrible language that makes our day-to-day lives slower and more miserable is actually anti-Python.

There are two sides to the Python problem: non-engineers using it to write runtime descriptions of data manipulations performed by non-python backends, and engineers writing it as an expose of their non-python backends.

Between the two groups, nobody is really here for Python.

Less-than optimization

Constraining values to small 0 <= N <= limit is something that many compilers now optimize for you to reduce the number of comparisons and to eliminate the branch implied by the “also”:

bool checkConstraint(/*signed*/ int i)
{
    return ( i >= 0 && i <= 10 ) ;
}

bool muchFasterCheckConstraint(/*signed*/ int i)
{
    return ( (unsigned int)i <= (unsigned int)10 ) ;
}