Hello all,

Mostly an assembly lurker here, but this one belongs in the high-level corner. For the last few months I've been chipping away at a small side project in Python: a system that rates professional tennis players with an Elo-style algorithm, fed with historical ATP/WTA match results.

What started as a quick experiment turned into a proper little rabbit hole — tuning the K-factor, weighting matches by surface, and decaying old results so a player's rating reflects current form rather than their career peak. The maths itself is simple enough, but getting the data pipeline clean and the parameters sensible took far longer than I expected.

It runs fine in Python, but once I feed it a few decades of matches the recompute starts to drag, and I keep eyeing the idea of rewriting the hot loop in something closer to the metal (which is probably why I keep ending up on this board).

Has anyone here built rating or ranking engines for sport or games? What did you reach for, and did you bother optimising the number-crunching, or just let the high-level language handle it? Always curious how people approach this kind of thing.

Small update: I finally put it online if anyone wants to poke at it — it's a small tennis rating engine. Feedback welcome, especially on the performance side.

All programs that are used for long enough will become slow as they expand to do more.

So for me I don't even think about HLL, I go straight to assembly first time. Might as well get it right first time and skip the intermediate steps IMO.