Saturday 4:30 p.m.–5 p.m.
Fast Python, Slow Python
Alex Gaynor
- Audience level:
- Intermediate
- Category:
- Best Practices & Patterns
Description
The common wisdom is that Python is slow. And yet people run high performance
software on it. It's hard to make Python fast, and yet there are incredibly
high performance Python VMs. This talk breaks down the facts and the myths
of Python performance.
Abstract
This talk broadly has two parts: things people think make Python slow, and why
those aren't true. And common practices people have in their code (often under
the guise of "writing idiomatic Python") which do lead to slow performance.
This talk attacks the notion that things like dynamic typing, boxing, and GC
make Python slow. And instead lays the blame at our feet, at the code we write,
the way we write code differently from programmers in other languages.
You'll leave this talk with a better understanding of how the code you write
affects the performance of your applications.