Learn Python by Building Data Science Applications

Numba

In this final subsection, we want to talk about Numba. It is probably one of the hottest ways to speed up your Python code with almost no changes. Numba compiles Python code—vanilla Python or NumPy-based—into C code using LLVM. By doing so—and by leveraging a suite of optimizations along the way—it drastically increases the speed of the code, especially if you use a lot of loops and NumPy arrays.

The great thing about Numba is that, in the best-case scenario, it will improve your code by adding a simple decorator over your function or class—that is, if you're lucky. If you're not, you'll have to work through the documentation and somewhat obscure error messages and experiment with datatype annotations. In some cases, Numba could be ...