[Cython] Wacky idea: proper macros

[Wes McKinney]

On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 4:55 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 30, 2012 at 9:49 PM, Dag Sverre Seljebotn
> <d.s.seljebotn at astro.uio.no> wrote:
>> JIT is really the way to go. It is one thing that a JIT could optimize the
>> case where you pass a callback to a function and inline it run-time. But
>> even if it doesn't get that fancy, it'd be great to just be able to write
>> something like "cython.eval(s)" and have that be compiled (I guess you could
>> do that now, but the sheer overhead of the C compiler and all the .so files
>> involved means nobody would sanely use that as the main way of stringing
>> together something like pandas).
>
> The overhead of running a fully optimizing compiler over pandas on
> every import is pretty high, though. You can come up with various
> caching mechanisms, but they all mean introducing some kind of compile
> time/run time distinction. So I'm skeptical we'll just be able to get
> rid of that concept, even in a brave new LLVM/PyPy/Julia world.
>
> -- Nathaniel
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I'd be perfectly OK with just having to compile pandas's "data engine"
and generate loads of C/C++ code. JIT-compiling little array
expressions would be cool too. I've got enough of an itch that I might
have to start scratching pretty soon.