[physicsguy]

I love Cython. I really feel like it's the right balance of usability and allowing you to do what you want/need. Want to make your code a bit faster? Write Python with type annotations. Want to call a C library? Just import the header, and then use it from a function.

Pybind11 is also great, but quite different in aims - I feel like it's more like a project for C++ programmers wanting to expose functionality to Python.

[jokoon]

Any benchmarks for type annotations?

I already wrote a few patch for pysfml, which is written in cython, it was a bit awkward, and now I'm asking myself if cython is really the right tool to write bindings, compared to cpython, for example.

[physicsguy]

Gonna depend a huge amount on what you're doing to be honest. I used it for physics modelling codes and it made a bit of a difference (comparable to Numba) but dropping to C for the main computation routines was what we ended up doing, and that worked very well for us.

It's very fast to write for, that's the main benefit. Use it together with profiling and just pick off the slowest part first.

[tristan957]

For what it's worth I wrote Python bindings using Cython for our open source C-API storage engine and the performance was fairly close to on par with C.

[machinekob]

Python with type annotations isnt faster using python runtime.

But some packages can utilize it for higher performance but most of the time it'll be slower cause you need to parse extra information if you want to reuse it in pure python.

[quietbritishjim]

It's true that if your Python code is being interpreted with CPython then adding type annotations won't make it any faster. But the comment said that if you're already compiling your Python code with Cython then adding type annotations will allow Cython to make your code a little faster.

[bobbylarrybobby]

You're thinking of CPython, the standard implementation of Python. Cython is a (barely) separate language that looks a lot like Python but gets compiled to something like C. When you need performance, you can drop down from (C)Python into Cython

[machinekob]

Mb im blind ofc Cython would be faster :P