Of course it depends what you're trying to do. I'm pretty sure that numpy/scipy have a lot more overhead than Matlab for everything that _isn't_ just a blas/lap

Of course it depends what you're trying to do. I'm pretty sure that numpy/scipy have a lot more overhead than Matlab for everything that _isn't_ just a blas/lapack call, but I don't have the numbers to back it up. I do know that I tried rewriting one of my C++ codes using scipy/numpy and it was about a hundred times slower for that particular task (which did happen to involve very large matrices, approaching the limits of memory).