Why is subtraction faster than addition in Python?

Question

I was optimising some Python code, and tried the following experiment:

import time

start = time.clock()
x = 0
for i in range(10000000):
    x += 1
end = tim         


        

Answer 1

Is there a more general programming lesson here?

The more general programming lesson here is that intuition is a poor guide when predicting run-time performance of computer code.

One can reason about algorithmic complexity, hypothesise about compiler optimisations, estimate cache performance and so on. However, since these things can interact in non-trivial ways, the only way to be sure about how fast a particular piece of code is going to be is to benchmark it in the target environment (as you have rightfully done.)