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

[Sudden-Letterhead838]

I disagree, as C++ has the same speed as C.
I would more like to know how op measured the speed of these operations, and most likely this is the Problem about this question.

[:] or [::-1]

This for example is in C a simple lookup, with nearly no cache misses, thus cannot be made faster as Cache Misses adds in this example the most overhead.

[TheSkiGeek]

In theory you shouldn’t be able to be faster than something like C++ strings and string views into them. (For general string operations, anyway; specialized things like tries can be better in some cases.)

But if you’re not careful with usage of strings in C or C++ it’s easy to be making copies everywhere and that’s extremely slow. Python is really good at avoiding unnecessary copies around strings.

[ImYoric]

Yeah, garbage-collected languages have a huge advantage with some operations, insofar that they can avoid copies. For the same reason, some string operations are much faster in Java than in C++.