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:

•  Why so slow? 2010-12
•  Cobra vs Python - speed 2010-11