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Comment by rich_sasha

Here’s an idea instead (maybe it already exists). Allow a decorator for writing inline Cython. It solves, I think, 90% of the problem. On first run, or eagerly, compile the decorated functions. Basically, Cython is the JIT, and user enables it explicitly.

This way I can easily write inlined functions with proper C speed, in a Python esque language.

Reasons why I rarely use Cython without this:

- unmodified Python code running in Cython is often faster, but not that much. 50% or so is my rule of thumb.

- but the development style is very different for Cython and Python, adding a lot of impedance. Eg reloading doesn’t quite work, profiling is different, you need a build directory and a build step at deployment etc.

- Cython proper is different enough and I’d argue unintuitive enough that if I have to have all these things in place, I might as well wrap my function in Rust.

Such a decorator would give you a low friction way to make things faster when you need it, with scope for making it much faster via all the funny Cython, while keeping Python-esque semantics, in particular "development semantics".

I think it would require some language modification since Cython was definitely a superset of Python; I think some of that syntax has been streamlined, but maybe still a strict superset.

parent rich_sasha 4 days ago

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