Eh, maybe. I don’t think many NumPy people would reach for a decimal dtype even if it were available and implemented in hardware. It just isn’t useful in the pr

Eh, maybe. I don’t think many NumPy people would reach for a decimal dtype even if it were available and implemented in hardware. It just isn’t useful in the primary domains where NumPy is used. That leaves vanilla Python. You’re right that compared to dynamic dispatch, a decimal op implemented in hardware is nothing, but the issue here (IMO) is death by a thousand cuts. Python is already slow as hell, and currently using decimal as a default would require a software implementation in many if not all places, which will be slow. Trade off does not seem worth it to me.