[garyrob]

Actually, Numba does support dicts now.(You can't have a mix of types in the dicts unless that's changed, but that isn't an actual problem for most ML work.) I have used numba very effectively to make my machine learning research projects run very quickly. I don't use pandas; I do use a lot of numpy and scipy. I understand that pandas can use numpy arrays for at least some things. Since numba works great with numpy, it seems like that might be an approach for using it with pandas, in at least some cases.