It should still be a perf gain: 1. Memory allocation isn't free 2. Doing multiple loops over the buffer (once per operation) is going to be slower than doing a

It should still be a perf gain: 1. Memory allocation isn't free 2. Doing multiple loops over the buffer (once per operation) is going to be slower than doing all the operations at once, both because of caching and the opportunity to do the operations on a register and write at the end (though who knows if the python interpreter will do that).