
Time complexity of Prefix Matching in high-level languages - ColinWright
http://neil.fraser.name/news/2007/10/09/
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dalke
For those interested, this is a place where PyPy shines over the CPython
implementation. With 2.7 the benchmark reports a 40x or 50x performance hit
from the linear ("obviously fast but isn't") vs. the binary search, which does
more object creation in order to push the comparison tests to C.

But with PyPy 1.5 I consistently find that the linear search is at least as
fast as the binary search.

(The benchmark uses a random single character change in a large string, hence
the variability of the answers.)

