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Is Python That Slow?

My standard response when someone asks me how I deal with Python being such a slow language is that Python is by far the fastest to write, cleanest, more maintainable programming language I know, and…

The reason this is significant is because Mac computers these days run on ARM based CPUs, so performance optimizations may have completely different characteristics than those designed for Intel chips. The GIL is a mechanism that protects the internal data structures maintained by the Python interpreter from becoming inconsistent due to concurrent access from multiple threads. Once again I'll repeat that even with this apparently big overhead some Python applications that are CPU-heavy and make use of multithreading will still see performance gains, so I don't want to be seen as having a negative view on it.

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