[willseth]

Every Python programmer should be thinking about far more important things than low level performance minutiae. Great reference but practically irrelevant except in rare cases where optimization is warranted. If your workload grows to the point where this stuff actually matters, great! Until then it’s a distraction.

[HendrikHensen]

Having general knowledge about the tools you're working with is not a distraction, it's an intellectual enrichment in any case, and can be a valuable asset in specific cases.

[willseth]

Knowing that an empty string is 41 bytes or how many ns it takes to do arithmetic operations is not general knowledge.

[amelius]

Yeah, if you hit limits just look for a module that implements the thing in C (or write it). This is how it was always done in Python.

[ryandrake]

I am currently (as we type actually LOL) doing this exact thing in a hobby GIS project: Python got me a prototype and proof of concept, but now that I am scaling the data processing to worldwide, it is obviously too slow so I'm rewriting it (with LLM assistance) in C. The huge benefit of Python is that I have a known working (but slow) "reference implementation" to test against. So I know the C version works when it produces identical output. If I had a known-good Python version of past C, C++, Rust, etc. projects I worked on, it would have been most beneficial when it came time to test and verify.

[pjmlp]

I rather have a JIT that avoids the "rewrite in C", unless there is no way around it, after heroic optimizations.

[willseth]

Sometimes it’s as simple as finding the hotspot with a profiler and making a simple change to an algorithm or data structure, just like you would do in any language. The amount of handwringing people do about building systems with Python is silly.

[kc0bfv]

I agree - however, that has mostly been a feeling for me for years. Things feel fast enough and fine.

This page is a nice reminder of the fact, with numbers. For a while, at least, I will Know, instead of just feel, like I can ignore the low level performance minutiae.