Why is numba faster than numpy here?

Question

I can\'t figure out why numba is beating numpy here (over 3x). Did I make some fundamental error in how I am benchmarking here? Seems like the perfect situation for numpy,

Answer 1

When you ask numpy to do:

x = x*2 - ( y * 55 )

It is internally translated to something like:

tmp1 = y * 55
tmp2 = x * 2
tmp3 = tmp2 - tmp1
x = tmp3

Each of those temps are arrays that have to be allocated, operated on, and then deallocated. Numba, on the other hand, handles things one item at a time, and doesn't have to deal with that overhead.