Accelerating code with Cython

Python is often criticized for being a slow programming language – an endlessly debatable statement. Many of these criticisms can be addressed by using a high-performance compiled library with a Python interface – such as the scientific Python stack – to greatly improve performance. However, there are some situations where it is difficult to avoid the fact that Python is not a compiled language. One way to improve performance in these (fairly rare) situations is to write a C extension (or even rewrite the code entirely in C) to speed up the critical parts. This will certainly make the code run more quickly, but it might make it more difficult to maintain the package. Instead, we can use Cython, which is an extension of the Python language that is transpiled into C and compiled for great performance improvements.

For example, we can consider some code that’s used to generate an image of the Mandelbrot set. For comparison,...