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do you really think it'll ever be able to compile arbitrary Python and make it fast most of the time? Cython never got there and numba is having a vastly different purpose.

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There are a lot of ambitious projects in this arena such as PyPy. Numba's approach is focused on getting computational codes faster. It's hard to say what "fast" means in many situations, because people don't realize that Python is actually quite fast for most tasks.

Cython isn't 1) able to compile Python or 2) fast?

Hate to have to tell all my Cython code it needs to break itself because the hackernews thinks so. =P

Cython isn't able to compile all Python. It definitely can compile a large subset of Python, but certainly not all of it. I don't actually know how fast the compiled Cython is - in my (very limited) experience, if you don't provide types, it's not a massive speedup over CPython.

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