How to initialise an integer array.array object with zeros in Python

Question

Questions with similar titles are about Python lists or NumPy. This is about the array.array class part of the standard Python library, see https://docs.python.org/2/library

Answer 1

Updated to Python 3 and added the 'B' method:

import array
import sys
import time

size = 100 * 1000**2
test = sys.argv[1]

class ZeroIterable:
    def __init__(self, size):
        self.size = size
        self.next_index = 0
    def __next__(self):
        if self.next_index == self.size:
            raise StopIteration
        self.next_index = self.next_index + 1
        return 0
    def __iter__(self):
        return self

t = time.time()
if test == 'Z':
    myarray = array.array('L')
    f = open('/dev/zero', 'rb')
    myarray.fromfile(f, size)
    f.close()
elif test == 'L':
    myarray = array.array('L', [0] * size)
elif test == 'S':
    myarray = array.array('L', [0]) * size
elif test == 'I':
    myarray = array.array('L', ZeroIterable(size))
elif test == 'B':
    myarray = array.array('L', bytes(size * 8))
print(len(myarray))
print(time.time() - t)

The 'S' method (array.array('L', [0]) * size) wins:

$ python3 --version
Python 3.7.3
$ python3 z.py Z
100000000
1.1691830158233643
$ python3 z.py L
100000000
2.712920665740967
$ python3 z.py S
100000000
0.6910817623138428
$ python3 z.py B
100000000
0.9187061786651611
$ python3 z.py I
100000000
62.862160444259644