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