Using fast libraries

Key 3: Use easy drop-in faster libraries.

There are libraries out there that can help a lot in optimizing code, rather than writing some optimized routines yourself. For example, if we have a list that needs to be fast at FIFO, we may use the blist package. We can use C versions of libraries, such as cStringIO (faster StringIO), ujson (faster JSON handling), numpy (math, and vectors), and lxml (XML handling). Most of the libraries that are listed here are just a Python wrapper over C libraries. You only need to search once for your problem domain. Other than this, we can make a C, or C++ library interface with Python very easily, which is also our next topic.