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Aug 29, 2023

Computer scientists develop open-source tool for dramatically speeding up the programming language Python

Posted by in category: robotics/AI

A team of computer scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, led by Emery Berger, recently unveiled a prize-winning Python profiler called Scalene. Programs written with Python are notoriously slow—up to 60,000 times slower than code written in other programming languages—and Scalene works to efficiently identify exactly where Python is lagging, allowing programmers to troubleshoot and streamline their code for higher performance.

There are many different —C++, Fortran and Java are some of the more well-known ones—but, in recent years, one language has become nearly ubiquitous: Python.

“Python is a ‘batteries-included’ language,” says Berger, who is a professor of computer science in the Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst, “and it has become very popular in the age of data science and because it is so user-friendly.” The comes with libraries of easy-to-use tools and has an intuitive and readable syntax, allowing users to quickly begin writing Python code.

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