I'd wonder if the Mathematica code was using fast constructs to begin with. It's best to think of Mathematica as being similar to Python + Numpy. If you want y

I'd wonder if the Mathematica code was using fast constructs to begin with. It's best to think of Mathematica as being similar to Python + Numpy. If you want your code to be fast, you want to spend as much time in the kernel (Numpy) as possible. That's why you'll want to take advantage of functional programming constructs, listable functions, etc. if you want to write fast Mathematica code.