Lanaro - Python high performance programming: boost the performance of your Python programs using advanced techniques

Gabriele Lanaro is a PhD student in Chemistry at the University of British Columbia, in the field of Molecular Simulation. He writes high performance Python code to analyze chemical systems in large-scale simulations. He is the creator of Chemlaba high performance visualization software in Pythonand emacs-for-pythona collection of emacs extensions that facilitate working with Python code in the emacs text editor. This book builds on his experience in writing scientific Python code for his research and personal projects.

I want to thank my parents for their huge, unconditional love and support. My gratitude cannot be expressed by words but I hope that I made them proud of me with this project.

I would also thank the Python community for producing and maintaining a massive quantity of high-quality resources made available for free. Their extraordinary supportive and compassionate attitude really fed my passion for this amazing technology.

A special thanks goes to Hessam Mehr for reviewing my drafts, testing the code and providing extremely valuable feedback. I would also like to thank my roommate Kaveh for being such an awesome friend and Na for bringing me chocolate bars during rough times.

Dr. Daniel Arbuckle is a published researcher in the fields of robotics and nanotechnology, as well as a professional Python programmer. He is the author of Python Testing: Beginner's Guide from Packt Publishing and one of the authors of Morphogenetic Engineering from Springer-Verlag .

Mike Driscoll has been programming in Python since Spring 2006. He enjoys writing about Python on his blog at http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/. Mike also occasionally writes for the Python Software Foundation, i-Programmer, and Developer Zone. He enjoys photography and reading a good book. Mike has also been a technical reviewer for Python 3 Object Oriented Programming, Python 2.6 Graphics Cookbook, and Tkinter GUI Application Development Hotshot.

I would like to thank my beautiful wife, Evangeline, for always supporting me. I would also like to thank friends and family for all that they do to help me. And I would like to thank Jesus Christ for saving me.

Albert Lukaszewski is a software consultant and the author of MySQL for Python . He has programmed computers for nearly 30 years. He specializes in high-performance Python implementations of network and database services. He has designed and developed Python solutions for a wide array of industries including media, mobile, publishing, and cinema. He lives with his family in southeast Scotland.

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Preface

Python is a programming language renowned for its simplicity, elegance, and the support of an outstanding community. Thanks to the impressive amount of high-quality third-party libraries, Python is used in many domains.

Low-level languages such as C, C++, and Fortran are usually preferred in performance-critical applications. Programs written in those languages perform extremely well, but are hard to write and maintain.

Python is an easier language to deal with and it can be used to quickly write complex applications. Thanks to its tight integration with C, Python is able to avoid the performance drop associated with dynamic languages. You can use blazing fast C extensions for performance-critical code and retain all the convenience of Python for the rest of your application.

In this book, you will learn, in a step-by-step method how to find and speedup the slow parts of your programs using basic and advanced techniques.

The style of the book is practical; every concept is explained and illustrated with examples. This book also addresses common mistakes and teaches how to avoid them. The tools used in this book are quite popular and battle-tested; you can be sure that they will stay relevant and well-supported in the future.

This book starts from the basics and builds on them, therefore, I suggest you to move through the chapters in order.

And don't forget to have fun!

What this book covers

, Benchmarking and Profiling shows you how to find the parts of your program that need optimization. We will use tools for different use cases and explain how to analyze and interpret profiling statistics.