I've found that python's turtle implementation is amazingly slow. I expected some delay, but not minutes of waiting for a relatively simple fractal (Koch curve with 5 iterations).
Even after setting turtle.speed(0) it is still very slow. Maybe there's a bug since it's not instantaneous like claimed in the docs?
This answer suggested re-implementing turtles by hiding a window. A similar question got no answer. Am I missing something, or is re-implementing the way to go?
Here is my stripped down code (the creation of the l-system is almost instantaneous):
import turtle
def l_system(V, w, P, n):
current = w
for i in range(n):
current = [P[x] if x in P else x for x in list(current)]
current = ''.join(current)
return current
def run_turtle(var, start, rules, iters, angle, size, scale):
terry = turtle.Turtle()
terry.pensize(1)
terry.pencolor("blue")
terry.speed(0)
dist = size / ((iters + 1) ** scale)
positions = []
angles = []
instructions = l_system(var, start, rules, iters)
for instr in instructions:
if instr in ('F', 'G'):
terry.forward(dist)
elif instr in ('M', 'N'):
terry.penup()
terry.forward(dist)
terry.pendown()
elif instr == '[':
positions.append(terry.pos())
angles.append(terry.heading())
elif instr == ']':
terry.goto(positions.pop())
terry.setheading(angles.pop())
elif instr == '+':
terry.left(angle)
elif instr == '-':
terry.right(angle)
turtle.mainloop()
def right_koch():
run_turtle(('F',), 'F', {'F':'F+F-F-F+F'}, 5, 90, 500, 3)
right_koch()
Turn off the drawing delay:
turtle.delay(0)
and hide the turtle:
terry.ht()
Turning off the drawing delay is the big one. If you don't do that, there's a 10-millisecond pause whenever the turtle moves.
If you want it to go even faster, and you only care about the finished picture, you can turn off screen updates entirely:
turtle.tracer(0, 0)
and call update a single time when your turtle has executed all its commands:
terry.update()
With tracing off and a manual update call, the program finishes near-instantaneously on my machine.