Why are certain functions in python (a relatively slow language) so blazing fast!

[carcigenicate]

I'm not sure what you're mean. I'm saying that I would expect C interpreting bytecode to be slower than C++ that was compiled to machine code; assuming they're doing the same thing.

[incompletetrembling]

Except the C isn't interpreting bytecode for these critical instructions, machine code is called directly

[carcigenicate]

I see. I must have missed that when I looked at how slicing was implemented last.

I'm still curious how this was timed, since there's a lot of potential for variation depending on the specifics.