deepcopy and python - tips to avoid using it?

Question

I have a very simple python routine that involves cycling through a list of roughly 20,000 latitude,longitude coordinates and calculating the distance of each point to a ref

Answer 1

I understand this doesn't directly address your question (and I know this is an old question), but since there is some discussion about performance it may be worthwhile to look at the append operation. You may want to consider "pre-allocating" the array. For example:

array = [None] * num_elements
for i in range(num_elements):
    array[i] = True

versus:

array = []
for i in range(num_elements):
    array.append(True)

A simple timeit run of these two methods shows a 25% improvement if you pre-allocate the array for even moderate values of num_elements.