Python Speed: 'x in list' vs 'x in set'

Well, this is my second post about speed in Python. Today, I noticed that debimg’s dependency resolver was much much slower than before. I thought what the problem could be and finally realized that the problem was that I switched from sets to list. This is fixed now in commit d0fd700080de5c19cb5fd66918d14c5ffa26e805

Now, some benchmarks (using IPython):

In [1]: a = range(10**6)

In [2]: b = set(a)

In [3]: %timeit 10**6 in a 10 loops, best of 3: 31.8 ms per loop

In [4]: %timeit 10**6 in b 10000000 loops, best of 3: 98.6 ns per loop

1ms are 1 million ns. Therefore, using sets is about 322515 times faster than using lists (or tuples).

debimg can now calculate dependencies in 0.5 seconds again, instead of 1 minute with lists.