[kapolos]

Yes, it's exactly as you say.

I did search for benchmark comparisons and bumped into one that had 2 orders of magnitude difference.

But naturally, isolated benchmarks can't encapsulate the whole picture because there's a world of difference between testing how fast a loop runs and performance in production.

[codedokode]

I guess that arithmetic operations are not very slow in Python, but if you use objects, then Python performs complicated lookups for every field or method access.