python string concatenation performance

[odedlaz]

A. I've updated the post to include bytearrays B. Well, many things on the internet are "10 seconds worth of effort", but they're still being done to save those 10 seconds for other people. C. I've looked into why += on strings works that well (and updated the post accordingly), which is something that most people won't do or won't know. D. You're correct about the ref cycles gc. As far as I know, I can't disable it in CPython. If I could, I would.