From the course: Faster Python Code
Join today to access over 22,600 courses taught by industry experts or purchase this course individually.
C extensions
- [Instructor] Sometimes no matter what we try, Python is just not fast enough. What we do then is identify the bottleneck in our program and re-write it an a more performant language. Most of the time this language is C. There are less painful options such as cython. However, c wizards know how to squeeze every cycle out of the CPU. I recommend going dowm the C extension path only after you tried other options and if you're familiar with C. A lot of times, changing algorithms at the Python level will yield much better results than rewriting C. The python C API is well documented. It gives you a great flexibility and many hooks into Python internal. However, there is a price. There's no memory management in C and you should read and understand how the Python garbage collector works and what are the differences between a borrowed reference to an owned reference. Let's look at an example. Computing square root with Newton's method. Here is the C file. Line four and five we define a C…
Practice while you learn with exercise files
Download the files the instructor uses to teach the course. Follow along and learn by watching, listening and practicing.
Download courses and learn on the go
Watch courses on your mobile device without an internet connection. Download courses using your iOS or Android LinkedIn Learning app.