How can I optimize this Python code to generate all words with word-distance 1?

Question

Profiling shows this is the slowest segment of my code for a little word game I wrote:

def distance(word1, word2):
    difference = 0
    for i in range(len(word         


        

Answer 1

For such a simple function that has such a large performance implication, I would probably make a C library and call it using ctypes. One of reddit's founders claims they made the website 2x as fast using this technique.

You can also use psyco on this function, but beware that it can eat up a lot of memory.