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[Python-Dev] Interest in integrating C decimal module into Python?

Mark Dickinson dickinsm at gmail.com
Wed Oct 21 16:59:44 CEST 2009 
On Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 11:37 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
> As far as decimal.py in particular goes, there are significant
> maintenance gains in keeping a lot of the non-performance critical
> context management code in pure Python. So we're likely to wait and see
> how much speed Mark can wring out of a simple C decimal coefficient
> object

No need to wait for this. :-)  I don't really expect to get much speed gain
at all in normal, low-precision (= precisions less than 100 digits, say)
use.  Even doubling the speed would be way too much to hope for here.

The only real gain from a decimal integer coefficient would be fixing
the asymptotics for high-precision calculations.

Mark
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