Pack and Unpack Performance Comparison

Strategy

Here are a few test to compare marshalling strategies in Python.

• Original: The code we started with.
• Early exit: Follows the best practice of exiting early.
• No f-string: Depending on the case, f-strings can be costly.
• Array: Using the builtin array.array module.
• Numpy: Using Numpy's ndarray.

Each strategy is a basic evolution from the original. Early exit and No f-string are only new unpack strategies.

Results

Conclusions

• Numpy is the winner in all cases.
• Early exit and No f-string didn't have noticeable impact.
• If you need to stick with built-ins you should use array.array.