Expert Python Programming - Third Edition

Cython as a source-to-source compiler

For extensions created using Cython, the major advantage you will get is using the superset language that it provides. Anyway, it is possible to create extensions from plain Python code using the source-to-source compilation. This is the simplest approach to Cython because it requires almost no changes to the code and can give some significant performance improvements at a very low development cost.

Cython provides a simple cythonize utility function that allows you to easily integrate the compilation process with distutils or setuptools. Let's assume that we would like to compile a pure Python implementation of our fibonacci() function to a C extension. If it is located in the fibonacci module, the minimal ...