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Tabulate Benchmark

Apple-to-apple performance comparison between zerodep tabulate and tabulate.

Test Environment

  • CPU: x86_64 Linux
  • Python: 3.12
  • Tool: pytest-benchmark 5.2.3 (mean values reported)
  • Reference: tabulate 0.10.0
  • Last Updated: 2026-04-21

Implementations

Implementation File/Package Description
zerodep tabulate.py Single-file table formatter, stdlib only
tabulate (reference) Popular table formatting library

Data Sizes Tested

Label Description
Small Simple 3-column, 3-row table
Medium 10-column, 20-row table with mixed types
Large 15-column, 100-row table with numbers and strings

Format Performance (Mean)

Data Size zerodep tabulate Speedup
Small 54.4 us 169.2 us 3.1x faster
Medium 403.2 us 1,800.0 us 4.5x faster
Large 6,570.0 us 27,340.0 us 4.2x faster

Key Takeaways

  • 3.1-4.5x faster formatting -- single-file implementation avoids the overhead of the reference library's multi-module dispatch and feature negotiation.
  • Speed advantage grows with data size -- zerodep's streamlined column-width calculation and row rendering scale more efficiently, reaching 4.5x on medium tables.
  • Zero pip dependencies -- zerodep uses only re, math, unicodedata, and dataclasses from the standard library.

Run It Yourself

pip install pytest pytest-benchmark tabulate
pytest tabulate/test_tabulate_benchmark.py --benchmark-only -v

Latest CI Results

Updated automatically on each release via Benchmark CI.