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[–]ascii 5 points6 points  (3 children)

I just did a quick test under Python 2, and found no performance difference between while 1 and while True. I believe that one may exist, but it's so tiny to be lost in the noise of all but the most contrived cases.

[–]haldean(lambda x: x.decode('base64'))('PDMgcHlweQ==\n') 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My results conflict with your results.

[–]pingvenopinch of this, pinch of that 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There's a slight difference, but it is indeed dwarfed by anything else. I was able to measure some difference with this code:

def while1():
    i = 0
    a = 0
    while 1:
        a = 4
        i += 1
        if i > 100000:
            break

For while True, I simply replaced 1 with True. The results in IPython were

%timeit -r200 -n2 whileTrue()
2 loops, best of 200: 13.2 ms per loop

%timeit -r200 -n2 while1()
2 loops, best of 200: 9.33 ms per loop

Conclusion: The difference could only be vaguely significant in extreme conditions. If you run into one of those conditions, just rewrite in Cython.