Is this AI? No, it’s just Python being slow.

So if you read my last post, I enjoy performance testing. While messing around with Rust vs. Python, I noticed that the compiler might be taking shortcuts in Rust.

The code in question looped a number of times and added 1 to a variable; after the loop finished it printed out the variable.

a = 0
for i in range(150000000):
    a++
print(a)

It seems simple, right? Well, not to Python… Python very obviously runs through every loop; all you have to do is run that little snippet. You can tell it is iterating through every loop because it doesn’t return immediately; in fact, it takes around four seconds to return on my machine.

If we take this same principle and write it in Rust, we get this:

fn main() {
    let mut a: u128 = 0;
    for _ in 0..150000000 {
        a += 1;
    }
    println!("{}", a);
}

There are several ways to run Rust code; you can use “cargo run” for a faster compile time, or for performance you can use:

cargo run --release

This code does the same thing as Python, but Rust returns as close to instantly as you can get. The only…