Exponentials in python: x**y vs math.pow(x, y)

Question

Which one is more efficient using math.pow or the ** operator? When should I use one over the other?

So far I know that x**y can return an int or a float if you use a decimal the function pow will return a float

import math

print math.pow(10, 2)

print 10. ** 2

Answer 1

Using the power operator ** will be faster as it won’t have the overhead of a function call. You can see this if you disassemble the Python code:

>>> dis.dis('7. ** i')
  1           0 LOAD_CONST               0 (7.0) 
              3 LOAD_NAME                0 (i) 
              6 BINARY_POWER         
              7 RETURN_VALUE         
>>> dis.dis('pow(7., i)')
  1           0 LOAD_NAME                0 (pow) 
              3 LOAD_CONST               0 (7.0) 
              6 LOAD_NAME                1 (i) 
              9 CALL_FUNCTION            2 (2 positional, 0 keyword pair) 
             12 RETURN_VALUE         
>>> dis.dis('math.pow(7, i)')
  1           0 LOAD_NAME                0 (math) 
              3 LOAD_ATTR                1 (pow) 
              6 LOAD_CONST               0 (7) 
              9 LOAD_NAME                2 (i) 
             12 CALL_FUNCTION            2 (2 positional, 0 keyword pair) 
             15 RETURN_VALUE         

Note that I’m using a variable i as the exponent here because constant expressions like 7. ** 5 are actually evaluated at compile time.

Now, in practice, this difference does not matter that much, as you can see when timing it:

>>> from timeit import timeit
>>> timeit('7. ** i', setup='i = 5')
0.2894785532627111
>>> timeit('pow(7., i)', setup='i = 5')
0.41218495570683444
>>> timeit('math.pow(7, i)', setup='import math; i = 5')
0.5655053168791255

So, while pow and math.pow are about twice as slow, they are still fast enough to not care much. Unless you can actually identify the exponentiation as a bottleneck, there won’t be a reason to choose one method over the other if clarity decreases. This especially applies since pow offers an integrated modulo operation for example.

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Alfe asked a good question in the comments above:

timeit shows that math.pow is slower than ** in all cases. What is math.pow() good for anyway? Has anybody an idea where it can be of any advantage then?

The big difference of math.pow to both the builtin pow and the power operator ** is that it always uses float semantics. So if you, for some reason, want to make sure you get a float as a result back, then math.pow will ensure this property.

Let’s think of an example: We have two numbers, i and j, and have no idea if they are floats or integers. But we want to have a float result of i^j. So what options do we have?

• We can convert at least one of the arguments to a float and then do i ** j.
• We can do i ** j and convert the result to a float (float exponentation is automatically used when either i or j are floats, so the result is the same).
• We can use math.pow.

So, let’s test this:

>>> timeit('float(i) ** j', setup='i, j = 7, 5')
0.7610865891750791
>>> timeit('i ** float(j)', setup='i, j = 7, 5')
0.7930400942188385
>>> timeit('float(i ** j)', setup='i, j = 7, 5')
0.8946636625872202
>>> timeit('math.pow(i, j)', setup='import math; i, j = 7, 5')
0.5699394063529439

As you can see, math.pow is actually faster! And if you think about it, the overhead from the function call is also gone now, because in all the other alternatives we have to call float().

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In addition, it might be worth to note that the behavior of ** and pow can be overridden by implementing the special __pow__ (and __rpow__) method for custom types. So if you don’t want that (for whatever reason), using math.pow won’t do that.