Is there a faster alternative to python's Decimal?

Question

Does anyone know of a faster decimal implementation in python?

As the example below demonstrates, the standard library\'s decimal module is ~100 times slower than

Answer 1

Use cDecimal.

Adding the following to your benchmark:

a = Timer("run('123.345', Decimal)", "import sys; import cdecimal; sys.modules['decimal'] = cdecimal; from decimal_benchmark import run; from decimal import Decimal")
print "CDECIMAL", a.timeit(1)

My results are:

FLOAT 0.0257983528473
DECIMAL 2.45782495288
CDECIMAL 0.0687125069413

(Python 2.7.6/32, Win7/64, AMD Athlon II 2.1GHz)