Performance improvement goodies

Let's spend some time discussing miscellaneous tips and tricks that help improve the runtime performance of the code. You can still apply a few of these techniques to the Gold Hunt problem, but let's just use generic examples to explain these concepts.

Tip

All the illustrations in this section can be found in the supporting file, misc_performance.py. To compare the performance, we will use the timeit module that was discussed in Chapter 7, Performance – Identifying Bottlenecks (refer to the Measuring runtime of small code snippets section). See also the timeit documentation, https://docs.python.org/3/library/timeit.html.

List comprehension

List comprehension is a compact way of creating a Python list. It is often used to replace the nested for loops or the map and filter functionality. Besides being compact, it is also efficient compared to, for instance, an equivalent for loop. The basic syntax is as follows:

a = [i*i for i in range(5)] 

This creates a list with...