Those are the quirks of CPython 2.7. The best optimisation is to run with PyPy — those benchmarks run about 10 times faster. After that, if you want to optimis

Those are the quirks of CPython 2.7. The best optimisation is to run with PyPy — those benchmarks run about 10 times faster. After that, if you want to optimise, you need an applicative benchmark. A microbenchmark won't work because type specialisation runs for (traces of) the program as a whole.