Comment by sieve
> If your only metric for a language is speed then nothing really beats hand crafted assembly
Only if you know the micro-architecture of the processor you are running on at great depth and can schedule the instructions accordingly. Modern compilers and vms can do crazy stuff at this level.
> Python is fast enough for a whole set of problems AND it is a pretty, easy to read and write language.
It is definitely easy to read. But speed is debatable. It is slow enough for my workload to start wondering about moving to pypy.
Will your program ever be fast if you don’t learn the microarchitecture of your CPU first? :)
PyPy is a valid option and one I would explore if it fits what you are doing.