On Thu, 2011-08-25 at 18:28 +0300, k_bx wrote:
The most popular (as from what I can see) thing right now where people start seeing that += is slow is when they try to do that on PyPy (which doesn't have hack like CPython, who is still slow) and ask "why my pypy code is sooooo slow".
I think a FAQ on "How can I make my python program faster?", with suggestions such as using list .join for building large strings instead of using += would be better. There probably already is one some place... Yep... http://wiki.python.org/moin/PythonSpeed/PerformanceTips This in my opinion is more about fitting the code to the problem than it is about speeding up general python code. I once wrote a text comparison engine that solved cryptograms by comparing to a text source. A large text source was read into a dictionary of words to be compared to. At first it was quite slow, but by presorting the data and putting it into smaller dictionaries, it sped up the program by several order of magnitudes. Cheers, Ron