numpy float: 10x slower than builtin in arithmetic operations?

Question

I am getting really weird timings for the following code:

import numpy as np
s = 0
for i in range(10000000):
    s += np.float64(1) # replace with np.float32         


        

Answer 1

If you're after fast scalar arithmetic, you should be looking at libraries like gmpy rather than numpy (as others have noted, the latter is optimised more for vector operations rather than scalar ones).