Quote from: jackg on February 08, 2018, 11:51:45 AM

As an extra note, Python is quite slow as a language to run (not entirely sure why) ...

For the ones of you who are interested in why phyton is slower than other languages (C for example):

1) Python is more of a interpreted than compiled language. (This is dependend on the implementation. Bust mostly its interpreted)

2) Initialization of variables is dynamically, not statically.
In C the compiler knows the type of a variable by its definition.
In Python the interpreter only knows that assigned variables are objects. The interpreter has to create/initialize a new python object to hold the returned value when the code is already running.

3) Pythons object model leads to inefficient memory access
Regarding Arrays:
In C you have a pointer to a contiguous data buffer.
In Python (list) you have a pointer to a contiguous buffer of pointers, each of which points to a python object which has references to its data.
This make python more expensive in terms of storage and access time.