IPython Interactive Computing and Visualization Cookbook

Accelerating pure Python code with Numba and just-in-time compilation

Numba (http://numba.pydata.org) is a package created by Continuum Analytics (http://www.continuum.io). At the time of writing, Numba is still a young and relatively experimental package, but its technology is promising. Numba takes pure Python code and translates it automatically (just-in-time) into optimized machine code. In practice, this means that we can write a non-vectorized function in pure Python, using for loops, and have this function vectorized automatically by using a single decorator. Performance speedups when compared to pure Python code can reach several orders of magnitude and may even outmatch manually-vectorized NumPy code.

In this section, we will show how ...