It's fun and probably useful, but Python is not 30 times slower than lua (from 33s to less than a sec). The 2 codes don't do the same thing, if you perform the

It's fun and probably useful, but Python is not 30 times slower than lua (from 33s to less than a sec). The 2 codes don't do the same thing, if you perform the same computation on the python code (monochrome mandelbrot, inline loop, 49 iterations, etc), you get 0.8 vs 4.8 sec, which seems about right. I've removed numpy since it's cheating if we compare raw language perfs: https://0bin.net/paste/nOtLmeMA#0DKGHSvmgoDLPzHlQOhwvVhxxayflBBHSeY0ktv-jpR https://0bin.net/paste/nOtLmeMA#0DKGHSvmgoDLPzHlQOhwvVhxxayf... So yes, Python is about 6 times slower. Significative, but can be worth the compromise if you consider the Python version is much, much easier to read. And of course, a vectorized algo would be even faster (see pbourke's comment). What's more, with SharedMemory from 3.8, you could speed that up even in pure Python using multiprocessing by sharing efficiently the array.