[sitkack]

I agree, Numba is awesome for lots of reasons. The biggest advantage for everyone, the Numba team as well as its users, is that it is opt-in and done with intent. The programmer is saying, "I am willing to constrain my code to get perf". And that you can do that inside an existing runtime is pretty damn cool.

I think for Python to get decent speedups the semantics for the code being optimized needs to be highly constrained.

Optimizing full in the wild Python code is a huge huge task. Optimizing for operations over constant type arrays is much much easier.

Yes this doesn't speed up the call or the allocation rate, but start with some easy stuff or nothing will improve.