[hogu]

Is compiled matlab code much faster? when I did it in the past it wasn't, My understanding was that it's doing the same thing, just without parsing the matlab source code, which isn't that slow anyways. Similarly, compiling python to C using cython by itself, is not faster - Compiling code to native machine code by itself doesn't do anything, unless you do something different, like declare the types, or unroll loops, etc.. The overhead of scripting languages is generally in the dynamism, unless you optimize that out in the compile step, you won't get speedups.

there are nice debugging environments for python, look at any python IDE, or look at spyder for this sort of work.

python plugs into general purpose tools much better - this is one of the main reasons I gave up matlab for python after using matlab for 10 years in school, all the way through into my PhD thesis.