"Having a Python C module gives significantly more power and performance, but comes with costs. it requires more code, it’s harder to find good documentation; and few features are easily accessible. While C modules appear to be an under-utilized tool for writing high performance Python modules (based on some FunctionTrace profiles I’ve seen), we’d recommend a balance. Write most of the non-performance critical code in Python and call into inner loops or setup code in C, for the pieces where Python doesn’t shine."<p>I've been wondering recently about the maintainability/community aspect of C vs. pure-python packages. I was choosing between a pure-python simhash library and 5-times-as-fast library with a C++ core, and ultimately had to choose pure-python because the C++ one doesn't have recent releases, can't be reliably installed from source, and is harder for me to fix if it breaks. In other words it suffers from a lower bus facter, which I'd predict is generally true of Python packages with a fast non-Python core.<p>This got me wondering, what is the way to write a fast core for a Python package that is most ... likely to survive, I guess, once the original maintainer loses interest? Would it be some form of C (I think necessary in this case), Rust (once the tooling gels a little), lua, wasm, something else?
I wrote and open sourced something very similar recently: <a href="https://github.com/kunalb/panopticon" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/kunalb/panopticon</a>. I don't think it's as sophisticated as function trace, but it generates chrome/catapult compatible traces instead and has some additions for async coroutines/generators.<p>Firefox's profiler looks pretty cool, I wish it could also accept catapult traces as is -- it doesn't seem to be the case. Now I know of:<p>- chrome://tracing
- Firefox's profiler
- Perfetto: <a href="https://ui.perfetto.dev/#!/" rel="nofollow">https://ui.perfetto.dev/#!/</a>
- Speedscope: <a href="https://www.speedscope.app/" rel="nofollow">https://www.speedscope.app/</a>
- Brendan Gregg's flamegraph generator<p>to help visualize traces. Are there other good ones?