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by kristofferc 2764 days ago
I feel that a comparison to the handwritten C++ version would make the claims a lot stronger. Making something 10x faster is not very hard if it is incredibly slow to begin with and is, on its own, fairly uninteresting. On the other hand, if the results here approcahed the speed of optimized C++ code, then this workflow makes a lot of sense.
2 comments

Seems there could be a cost/benefit analysis here. Ten times faster than python might be sufficient for some applications given the potential for much faster deployment, regardless of whether handwritten C might be faster.
You're absolutely right: you don't necessarily need to be within 10% of pure C++ if algo development is made far easier by using python/numpy. But it would be good to have a hand-written C++ baseline to determine where the cost/benefit point is (at least for this example).
That's a fair point and I have to admit I didn't have the time/courage to port the entire algo to C++. But I can see why that would make the results a lot more convincing.