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Comment by evanb

8 hours ago

Mathematica has symbolic and infinite-precision addition, so you can't automatically take advantage of obvious compiled code.

What? Arbitrary precision arithmetic implemented in a compiled language will be faster than the alternative. This is no great mystery. The same is true of essentially all low-level symbolic or numerical math algorithms. You need to get to a fairly high level before this stops being true.

  • Of course. The point is whether you interpret a call to arbitrary_precision_add or compile the call doesn't matter much.