Guido van Rossum - Some patterns for fast Python. →

• Avoid overengineering datastructures. Tuples are better than objects (try namedtuple too though). Prefer simple fields over getter/setter functions.

• Built-in datatypes are your friends. Use more numbers, strings, tuples, lists, sets, dicts. Also check out the collections library, esp. deque.

• Be suspicious of function/method calls; creating a stack frame is expensive.

• Don’t write Java (or C++, or Javascript, …) in Python.

• Are you sure it’s too slow? Profile before optimizing!

• The universal speed-up is rewriting small bits of code in C. Do this only when all else fails.