Run faster Python

MYSELF

Sr Data Engineer @ Singaporean Bank

Why Python is Slow ?

• Syntax is parsed, compiled to bytecode and then runs in the VM

• Garbage collection to deallocate objects with zero references

• Types are tagged to objects and there are various sanity checks before the operation is performed.        Ex: 1+"1" errors before operation

• In multi-thread environment python makes sure only one thread is running all the time because VM isn't threadsafe i.e, two threads operating on object's reference count is not thread safe. Ref

Use Zig/C to bypass cpython restrictions

• Just run the machine code in runtime period.
• NO VM as it's simply Zig
• NO locking of threads, one thread waits for the external zig program to return a value, another thread can keep running simultaneously. Ref
• NO automatic memory management
• NO housekeeping tasks like garbage collector

Benefits - Zig/C and Cpython

Python

C

Ref

• It's python module offering c like data types and calls functions from C-ABI compatible shared libraries created using any language 

Let's understand with few examples

add.c

add.py

result

concat.c

concat_c.py

Result

• Calculate first 50,000 and 1,00,000 primes in Pure Python and C lib interfaced Python

prime.c

prime.py

Let's build the fastest LLM tokenizer library using ctypes

[3957, 735, 37432, 18, 555, 2394, 1003, 519, 841, 301, 11007, 949]

Ref

Ref: https://ziglang.org

Note: size param in token_ranker is length of name string

Perfomance

Note: Zig uses PCRE2 for Regex operations

Note: All implementations are run on single thread

           Rust implementation is Tiktoken library

           Zig uses FancyRegex for Regex operations

Thank You!

https://github.com/akhildevelops/pycon-2024