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Python Performance: Why 'if not list' is 2x Faster Than Using len()
(blog.codingconfessions.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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Technology
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This is my two cents as someone in the industry.
Because, while you don't want to nitpick on each instruction cycle, sometimes the code runs millions of times and each microsecond adds up.
Keep in mind that people use this kind of things for work, serving real world customers who are doing their work.
Yes, the language itself is not optimal even by design, but its easy to work with, so they are making it worth a while. There's no shortage of people who can work with it. It is easy to develop and maintain stuff with it, cutting development cost. Yes, we're talking real businesses with real resource constraints.
Exactly. We picked it for the reasons you mentioned, and I still think it's a good choice.
That said, some of our heavier logic is in a lower-level language. We had some Fortran code until recently (rewrote in Python and just ate the perf cost to lower barrier to other devs fixing stuff), and we're introducing some C++ code in the next month or two. But the bulk of our code is in Python, because that's what glues everything together, and the code is fast enough for our needs.
People seem to be unaware that python has bindings for lower-level languages like C. In fact, people have been heavily using resource intensive libraries implemented in C (e.g. numpy, scipy, pandas, uwsgi).
Also, Python interpreter performance has come a long way.