Both the code snippets below check if an element exists in the array but first approach takes < 100ms while the second approach takes ~6 seconds .
Does anyone know why ?
import numpy as np
import time
xs = np.random.randint(90000000, size=8000000)
start = time.monotonic()
is_present = -4 in xs
end = time.monotonic()
print( 'exec time:', round(end-start, 3) , 'sec ') // 100 milliseconds
start = time.monotonic()
for x in xs:
if (x == -4):
break
end = time.monotonic()
print( 'exec time:', round(end-start, 3) , 'sec ') // 6000 milliseconds ```
numpy is specifically built to accelerate this kind of code, it is written in c with almost all of the python overhead removed, comparatively your second attempt is pure python so it takes much longer to loop through all the elements