Python object initialisation performance
<p>I was just doing some quick performance tests, and I noticed that initialising a list generically is about four to six times slower than explicitly (those are probably the wrong terms, I'm not sure on the lingo here). For example:</p>

<pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; import timeit
&gt;&gt;&gt; print timeit.timeit('l = list()', number = 10000000)
1.66420578957
&gt;&gt;&gt; print timeit.timeit('l = []',     number = 10000000)
0.448561906815
</code></pre>

<p>And similarly with tuples and ints:</p>

<pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; print timeit.timeit('l = tuple()', number = 10000000)
1.10791182518
&gt;&gt;&gt; print timeit.timeit('l = ()',      number = 10000000)
0.23167181015

&gt;&gt;&gt; print timeit.timeit('l = int()', number = 10000000)
1.3009660244
&gt;&gt;&gt; print timeit.timeit('l = 0',     number = 10000000)
0.232784032822
</code></pre>

<p>Why is this?</p>
