Bifalgorithm post

Why are languages like C, which we do teach in CS50 and Rust so much faster than a language like Python? There are a few reasons why that's true. One is that C and Rust are both compiled languages. When you write a C program or a Rust program, you compile it into a binary, which are just zeros and ones the computer can interpret. And the computer knows how to execute the instructions that correspond to those zeros and ones. Python, meanwhile, is what we call an interpreted language. When you run a Python program, there's a separate program called the interpreter that's going through your Python code one line at a time and figuring out how to run that. So that adds some extra steps there. And also with each line of Python code, there's more that the computer has to do than when running any one line of like C or Rust code. Python is doing more for you behind the scenes. For example. From CS50, you might remember that when you're writing C code, you are responsible for managing all of the memory yourself. If you want to allocate memory, if you want to free memory, that's all on you to know when and how to do that. Whereas Python is a what we call memory managed language. So Python, the interpreter, takes care of all of that memory management for you. You don't need to ask for memory and free it when you're done with it. Python's doing all of that behind the scenes. And that's nice as the programmer, but it also means there's more work that's being done that's going to take up some more time.

Why are languages like C, which we do teach in CS50 and Rust so much faster than a language like Python? There are a few reasons why that's true. One is that C…