are python lambdas implemented differently from standard functions?

Question

While trying to write an answer for another SO question something really peculiar happened.

I basically came up with a one liner gcd and said it maybe slower because of recursion
gcd = lambda a,b : a if not b else gcd(b, a % b)

heres a simple test:

assert gcd(10, 3) == 1 and gcd(21, 7) == 7 and gcd(100, 1000) == 100

here are some benchmarks:

timeit.Timer('gcd(2**2048, 2**2048+123)', setup = 'from fractions import gcd').repeat(3, 100)
# [0.0022919178009033203, 0.0016410350799560547, 0.0016489028930664062]
timeit.Timer('gcd(2**2048, 2**2048+123)', setup = 'gcd = lambda a,b : a if not b else gcd(b, a % b)').repeat(3, 100)
# [0.0020480155944824219, 0.0016460418701171875, 0.0014090538024902344]

Well thats interesting I expected to be much slower but the timings are fairly close, ? maybe importing the module is the issue ...

>>> setup = '''
... def gcd(a, b):
...     """Calculate the Greatest Common Divisor of a and b.
... 
...     Unless b==0, the result will have the same sign as b (so that when
...     b is divided by it, the result comes out positive).
...     """
...     while b:
...         a, b = b, a%b
...     return a
... '''
>>> timeit.Timer('gcd(2**2048, 2**2048+123)', setup = setup).repeat(3, 100)
[0.0015637874603271484, 0.0014810562133789062, 0.0014750957489013672]

nope still fairly close timings ok lets try larger values.

timeit.Timer('gcd(2**9048, 2**248212)', setup = 'gcd = lambda a,b : a if not b else gcd(b, a % b)').repeat(3, 100) [2.866894006729126, 2.8396279811859131, 2.8353509902954102]
[2.866894006729126, 2.8396279811859131, 2.8353509902954102]
timeit.Timer('gcd(2**9048, 2**248212)', setup = setup).repeat(3, 100)
[2.8533108234405518, 2.8411397933959961, 2.8430981636047363]

interesting I wonder whats going on?
I always assumed recursion was slower because of the overhead of calling a function, are lambdas the exception? and why I haven't reach my recursion limit?
If implemented using def I hit it right away, if I increase the recursion depth to something like 10**9 I actually get a segmentation fault probably a stack overflow ...

Update

>>> setup = '''
... import sys
... sys.setrecursionlimit(10**6)
... 
... def gcd(a, b):
...     return a if not b else gcd(b, a % b)
... '''
>>> 
>>> timeit.Timer('gcd(2**9048, 2**248212)', setup = 'gcd = lambda a,b:a if not b else gcd(b, a%b)').repeat(3, 100)
[3.0647969245910645, 3.0081429481506348, 2.9654929637908936]
>>> timeit.Timer('gcd(2**9048, 2**248212)', setup = 'from fractions import gcd').repeat(3,   100)
[3.0753359794616699, 2.97499680519104, 3.0096950531005859]
>>> timeit.Timer('gcd(2**9048, 2**248212)', setup = setup).repeat(3, 100)
[3.0334799289703369, 2.9955930709838867, 2.9726388454437256]
>>> 

even more puzzling ...

Answer 1

counter = 0

def gcd(a, b):
    global counter
    counter += 1
    return a if not b else gcd(b, a % b)

gcd(2**9048, 2**248212)
print counter

Prints 3. Of course there is not a lot of overhead for a recursion of depth 3.