>I highly doubt that the performance difference is a result of not inlining/unrolling sprintf(). The difference is most likely due to the fact that sprintf() is

>I highly doubt that the performance difference is a result of not inlining/unrolling sprintf(). The difference is most likely due to the fact that sprintf() is parsing the format string over and over, whereas PyPy is only parsing it once. And the fact that it only runs twice as long is pretty impressive, actually. Sprintf is doing the parsing 999,999,999 times more than the PyPy interpreter is.