Why is “not” faster than “bool()” in Python (or, speed of Python functions vs. statements)?

Question

I made an interesting observation the other day. I was experimenting with various ways to get the \"truthiness\" of an object and the speed of each, and I noticed that

Answer 1

All function calls have significant overhead -- you're creating a new stack frame to hold the new locals you have within your call, after all.

If this were a more expensive operation, that overhead would get lost in the noise. Since you're looking at such a trivial operation, it stands out.