[johndough]

In theory, a compiler toolchain is not required since Numba already comes with LLVM, i.e. for JIT compilation, no additional compiler is necessary.

In the past, that was also possible for AOT compilation [1], but that technique broke during some update and it seems like there is no one left who knows how to fix this.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/42198101

[woadwarrior01]

Jax also has experimental support for persisting its JIT cache on the filesystem in the ‘jax.experimental.compilation_cache’ module.

[VHRanger]

How does jax compare to numba?

[woadwarrior01]

numba is more general. Any change to the shapes of arrays triggers a JIT recompilation in jax, numba is a bit more forgiving. jax has autodiff that numba doesn't. Also, JAX supports TPUs, which numba doesn't support (yet).