alt Hacker NewsRarely. Most tinkering tasks just don't have enough heavy duty computation in them to as much as strain a modern CPU. And most of the rest are covered by packages like numpy or pytorch.
For the rare exceptions, I make a C lib and call into it to get my numbers crunched. I get that Zig is a viable replacement for C there. But I don't see it replacing Python.
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Even if you are fine with Python's speed, its memory consumption DOES effect things and can be an extraordinary pain when you need to fit the result of your tinkering in any sort of constrained environment.
And if you really need more performance (or, more often, fast startup times), Go gives you 90% of the speed with 30% of the effort. Rust if you really want to squeeze everything that can possibly be squeezed of that CPU.
Not to mention that where heavy computation is required, Python often has libraries that are much, much faster than anything you can quickly hack together in C or Zig.
> For the rare exceptions, I make a C lib
The problem is that most people using Python don't have enough expertise in C to do the same.
It also kinda destroys the argument that Python is good if your solution for performance is to use a different language alongside it.