Understand order of magnitude performance gap between python and C++

[jefsummers]

Compiled languages typically are faster than interpreted or hybrid, depending on factors such as the efficiency of the compiler, bytecode interpreter, etc. As one learns Python, you find that doing things in the "pythonic" way can be quite fast - list comprehensions, Pandas operations etc.

You started with a program optimized for C++. Translation of that to any other language is almost guaranteed to be less efficient.

So, first that I would do is take the Python version, put it up on Google Colab, and run it using GPU or TPU hardware acceleration and see if that perks things up. In once online course that ran faster than using IBM's Watson. That, while doing a rewrite in Python that starts from scratch and uses pythonic code.