Are list-comprehensions and functional functions faster than “for loops”?

Question

In terms of performance in Python, is a list-comprehension, or functions like map(), filter() and reduce() faster than a for loop? Why

Answer 1

If you check the info on python.org, you can see this summary:

Version Time (seconds)
Basic loop 3.47
Eliminate dots 2.45
Local variable & no dots 1.79
Using map function 0.54

But you really should read the above article in details to understand the cause of the performance difference.

I also strongly suggest you should time your code by using timeit. At the end of the day, there can be a situation where, for example, you may need to break out of for loop when a condition is met. It could potentially be faster than finding out the result by calling map.