How to initialise an integer array.array object with zeros in Python

Question

Questions with similar titles are about Python lists or NumPy. This is about the array.array class part of the standard Python library, see https://docs.python.org/2/library/array.html

The fasted approach I came up with (for integer types) is to use array.fromfile with /dev/zero. This is

• about 27 times faster than array.array('L', [0] * size), which temporarily requires more than twice the memory than for the final array,
• about 4.7 times faster than arrar.array('L', [0]) * size
• and over 200 times faster than using a custom iterable object (to avoid creating a large temporary list).

However, /dev/zero may be unavailable on some platforms. Is there a better way to do this without NumPy, non-standard modules or my own c-extension?

Demonstrator code:

import array
import sys
import time

size = 100 * 1000**2
test = sys.argv[1]

class ZeroIterable:
    def __init__(self, size):
        self.size = size
        self.next_index = 0
    def next(self):
        if self.next_index == self.size:
            raise StopIteration
        self.next_index = self.next_index + 1
        return 0
    def __iter__(self):
        return self

t = time.time()
if test == 'Z':
    myarray = array.array('L')
    f = open('/dev/zero', 'rb')
    myarray.fromfile(f, size)
    f.close()
elif test == 'L':
    myarray = array.array('L', [0] * size)
elif test == 'S':
    myarray = array.array('L', [0]) * size
elif test == 'I':
    myarray = array.array('L', ZeroIterable(size))     
print time.time() - t

Answer 1

Updated to Python 3 and added the 'B' method:

import array
import sys
import time

size = 100 * 1000**2
test = sys.argv[1]

class ZeroIterable:
    def __init__(self, size):
        self.size = size
        self.next_index = 0
    def __next__(self):
        if self.next_index == self.size:
            raise StopIteration
        self.next_index = self.next_index + 1
        return 0
    def __iter__(self):
        return self

t = time.time()
if test == 'Z':
    myarray = array.array('L')
    f = open('/dev/zero', 'rb')
    myarray.fromfile(f, size)
    f.close()
elif test == 'L':
    myarray = array.array('L', [0] * size)
elif test == 'S':
    myarray = array.array('L', [0]) * size
elif test == 'I':
    myarray = array.array('L', ZeroIterable(size))
elif test == 'B':
    myarray = array.array('L', bytes(size * 8))
print(len(myarray))
print(time.time() - t)

The 'S' method (array.array('L', [0]) * size) wins:

$ python3 --version
Python 3.7.3
$ python3 z.py Z
100000000
1.1691830158233643
$ python3 z.py L
100000000
2.712920665740967
$ python3 z.py S
100000000
0.6910817623138428
$ python3 z.py B
100000000
0.9187061786651611
$ python3 z.py I
100000000
62.862160444259644