>It is astonishing how fast a computer is without the overhead most modern languages bring in. No kidding! I once implemented Knuth's Dancing Links/Algorithm X

>It is astonishing how fast a computer is without the overhead most modern languages bring in. No kidding! I once implemented Knuth's Dancing Links/Algorithm X[1] in Python, as part of a Sudoku solver. At one step in the algorithm you need to choose from a group of "things to do next"; the C version I was using as a reference just chose "the next item" in the group (it was stored as a linked list). Changing it to the more efficient method of scanning all the items and choosing the one which would more fully constrain the search space made no obvious difference in the time it took to solve a 9x9 Sudoku -- practically instant. In the Python version, the efficient strategy also solved 9x9's practically instantly; the simpler strategy ended up taking several minutes! I forget exactly how many unnecessary steps the simpler version ending up taking -- hundreds of thousands, maybe -- but the C code just got out of the way and let the processor crunch through them too quickly to care about. [1] https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~jchu/publicportal/sudoku/0011047.pdf https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~jchu/publicportal/sudoku/00110...