PROGRAMMING
How Fast Is C++ Compared to Python?
An example for data scientists who believe they don’t need to know C++
There are millions of reasons to love Python (especially for data scientists). But how is Python different from more professional low-level programming languages like C or C++? I guess this is a question that many data scientists or Python users asked or will ask themselves one day. There are many differences between Python and languages like C++. For this article, I am going to show you how fast C++ is compared to Python with a super simple example.
To show the difference, I decided to go with a simple and practical task instead of an imaginary task. The task that I am going to accomplish is to generate all possible DNA k-mers for a fixed value of “k”. If you don’t know about DNA k-mers, I explain it in plain language in the next section. I chose this example because many genomic-related data processing and analysis tasks (e.g. k-mers generation) are considered computationally intensive. That’s a reason why many data scientists in the field of bioinformatics are interested in C++ (in addition to Python).
