I was interested in how this compares in a kind of absolute sense. For comparison, an optimized C hello world program gave these results using `perf` on my Dell

I was interested in how this compares in a kind of absolute sense. For comparison, an optimized C hello world program gave these results using `perf` on my Dell XPS 13 laptop: 0.000636230 seconds time elapsed 0.000759000 seconds user 0.000000000 seconds sys That's 36,800% faster. Hand-written assembly was very slightly slower. Using the standard library for output instead of a syscall brought it down to 20,900% faster. (Yes I used percentages to underscore how big the difference is. It's 368x and 209x respectively. That's huge.) Begrudgingly, here are the standard Python numbers: real 0m0.019s user 0m0.015s sys 0m0.004s About 1230% faster than the sandbox, i.e. 12.3x. About an order of magnitude, which is typical for these kinds of exercises.