== To Do ==

 * -turbo
 * using Stopwatch
 * profilers
 * benchmarks
 * avoid when possible: slicing, dynamic, exceptions, i/o
 * don't optimize if you don't need to, root of all evil

== Example ==
From the discussion thread in the forums (Why so slow?), some modified versions of the code are available for comparison:
 * With Python 3.6.0, running against a slightly modified version (for tracking time) with 50,000 loops yielded a run-time of 0.66819638 seconds.
 * An initial port (which included substantial refactoring to identify the cause of the different final results) with 50,000 loops yielded a run-time of 98.284 seconds
 * After numerous attempts at speed improvement, the cobra code was sped up to a run-time of 0.057 seconds (or 11x faster than python, or 1,724x faster than original implementation.

Some of the strategies attempting are listed below and whether they yielded much of a performance change:
 * Made sure the the for loop variables had explicit types: yielded 33x improvement
 * Used float instead of decimal: yielded 7x improvement
 * Using multiplication instead of division: yielded 1.2x improvement
 * Converted Math.pow to Math.sqrt for square roots: yielded 1.05x improvement
 * Moved variable declarations into function-level scope: NO IMPROVEMENT
 * Replaced properties with public fields: 1.6x improvement

== Discussions ==

Here are some select discussions on performance:

 * [http://cobra-language.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=700 Why so slow?] 2010-12
 * [http://cobra-language.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=692 Cobra vs Python - speed] 2010-11