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You're reading from  Learning Cython Programming (Second Edition) - Second Edition

Product typeBook
Published inFeb 2016
Reading LevelBeginner
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781783551675
Edition2nd Edition
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Philip Herron
Philip Herron
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Philip Herron

Philip Herron is a developer who focuses his passion toward compilers and virtual machine implementations. When he was first accepted to Google Summer of Code 2010, he used inspiration from Paul Biggar's PhD on the optimization of dynamic languages to develop a proof of the concept GCC frontend to compile Python. This project sparked his deep interest in how Python works. After completing a consecutive year on the same project in 2011, Philip applied to Cython under the Python foundation to gain a deeper appreciation of the standard Python implementation. Through this he started leveraging the advantages of Python to control the logic in systems or even add more high-level interfaces, such as embedding Flask web servers in a REST API to a system-level piece of software, without writing any C code. Philip currently works as a software consultant for Instil Software based in Northern Ireland. He develops mobile applications with embedded native code for video streaming. Instil has given him a lot of support in becoming a better engineer. He has written several tutorials for the UK-based Linux Format magazine on Python and loves to share his passion for the Python programming language.
Read more about Philip Herron

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Numba versus Cython


Numba is another way to get your Python code to become almost native to your host system by outputting the code to be run on LLVM seamlessly. Numba makes use of decorators such as the following:

@autojit
def myFunction (): ...

Numba also integrates with NumPy. On the whole, it sounds great. Unlike Cython, you only apply decorators to pure Python code, and it does everything for you, but you may find that the optimizations will be fewer and not as powerful.

Numba does not integrate with C/C++ to the extent that Cython does. If you want it to integrate, you need to use Foreign Function Interfaces (FFI) to wrap calls. You also need to define structs and work with C types in Python code in a very abstract sense to a point where you don't really have much control as compared with Cython.

Numba is mostly comprised of decorators, such as @locals, from Cython. But in the end, all this creates is just-in-time-compiled functions with a proper native function signature. Since you can...

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Learning Cython Programming (Second Edition) - Second Edition
Published in: Feb 2016Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781783551675

Author (1)

author image
Philip Herron

Philip Herron is a developer who focuses his passion toward compilers and virtual machine implementations. When he was first accepted to Google Summer of Code 2010, he used inspiration from Paul Biggar's PhD on the optimization of dynamic languages to develop a proof of the concept GCC frontend to compile Python. This project sparked his deep interest in how Python works. After completing a consecutive year on the same project in 2011, Philip applied to Cython under the Python foundation to gain a deeper appreciation of the standard Python implementation. Through this he started leveraging the advantages of Python to control the logic in systems or even add more high-level interfaces, such as embedding Flask web servers in a REST API to a system-level piece of software, without writing any C code. Philip currently works as a software consultant for Instil Software based in Northern Ireland. He develops mobile applications with embedded native code for video streaming. Instil has given him a lot of support in becoming a better engineer. He has written several tutorials for the UK-based Linux Format magazine on Python and loves to share his passion for the Python programming language.
Read more about Philip Herron