Comment by quietbritishjim

I'm a bit confused about the premise. This is not comparing pure Python code against some native (C or Rust) code. It's comparing one Python wrapper around native code (Python's file read method) against another Python wrapper around some native code (OpenDAL). OK it's still interesting that there's a difference in performance, but it's very odd to describe it as "slower than Python". Did they expect that the Python standard library is all written in pure Python? On the contrary, I would expect the implementations of functions in Python's standard library to be native and, individually, highly optimised.

I'm not surprised the conclusion had something to do with the way that native code works. Admittedly I was surprised at the specific answer - still a very interesting article despite the confusing start.

Edit: The conclusion also took me a couple of attempts to parse. There's a heading "C is slower than Python with specified offset". To me, as a native English speaker, this reads as "C is slower (than Python) with specified offset" i.e. it sounds like they took the C code, specified the same offset as Python, and then it's still slower than Python. But it's the opposite: once the offset from Python was also specified in the C code, the C code was then faster. Still very interesting once I got what they were saying though.