\subsection{Complex List Ops}

In your day to day work you will very likely come across performance issues in Python.

Sometimes it's a good idea to choose a different data structure than you have used to speed up certain operations.

However, you may come across situations where this is even not enough.

Instead of switching to another language like C, you may want to check out the \lstinline{blist} package first.

\glqq The \lstinline{blist} is a drop-in replacement for the Python list that provides better performance when modifying large lists.\grqq

Here is a small snippet illustrating the huge impact of using a \lstinline{blist} instead of a \lstinline{list}:

\lstinputlisting[caption=complex\_list\_ops.py]{../third_party/complex_list_ops.py}

\begin{lstlisting}[caption=Output of complex\_list\_ops.py]

$ python complex_list_ops.py

"Builtin" spend time: 24.61005

"Blist" spend time: 4.675813

\end{lstlisting}

\glqq The blist package also provides \lstinline{sortedlist}, \lstinline{sortedset}, [...] \lstinline{btuple} types\grqq , and much more.