Cython 0.20

It was version 0.11.1 & 5yrs back, and I was in undergrad college. We used to hack on the cython code all night. :)

I got very Poor Grades that whole term.

And I can't forget those days, we used to hack all night on cython code but missing very important college lectures!

I did not even know how to commit!

But, It was pure thrill. Those were the days, I badly miss today!

And surprisingly I also fixed a very critical bug, that was the very first bug I had fixed in my Life. I started to realize, valuate & appreciate Open source & the reach of OSS!

cython changed my perception about software!

That marked my entry into OSS, and I was writing & optimizing for good code with standards and all the documentation. Until then I couldn't appreciate anything much of OSS.

* I literally danced around after I submitted that bug, and incidentally it got approved and committed too! :D

And it was the very early days of Cython Project <ver 0.11>

http://trac.cython.org/cython_trac/ticket/203

And today when I checked Cython Project, I feel awesome within, all around my body; esp the way Cython has grown & is being consumed across!

Power of OSS!

We should be honoring and celebrating every project out there that has done so much to Humanity!

History: Back in 2008 I read the book http://producingoss.com/ and was at the same time dealing with several forks of http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/greg.ewing/python/Pyrex/ for use in my project http://sagemath.org. Inspired by producingoss, I came up with the name "Cython" during a brainstorming session with Tom Boothby, then made a website (cython.org), listed the three leaders of the various Pyrex forks as project leaders (one was my Ph.D. student), and crossed my fingers. It worked.

I've been playing with Cython recently and I'm really impressed with its compatibility with arbitrary Python code. It's possible to compile all of Tornado with only minor changes (for a ~25% speedup without any type annotations). https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/python-tornado/Kele7...

From https://github.com/cython/cython/blob/master/README.txt:

Cython (http://cython.org) is a language that makes writing C extensions for the Python language as easy as Python itself. Cython is based on the well-known Pyrex, but supports more cutting edge functionality and optimizations.

The Cython language is very close to the Python language, but Cython additionally supports calling C functions and declaring C types on variables and class attributes. This allows the compiler to generate very efficient C code from Cython code.

This makes Cython the ideal language for wrapping external C libraries, and for fast C modules that speed up the execution of Python code.

I love this project. Fantastic way to write Python bindings for native libs or speed up computationally intensive code without having to write C yourself.

For anyone confused by all the Python nomenclature (hint: Cython != CPython!) this article: http://www.toptal.com/python/why-are-there-so-many-pythons was on HN a few days back, and is worth a read.

You had me at:

> Support for calling C++ template functions.

I love this, thanks to projects like this, is why great libraries as Kivy exists.

i remember cython from the time it was called pyrex. it was already very good then. iirc it was around the time when firefox was called phoenix...

guys, you're way past version 1.0 in most users' minds, might as well consider dropping the 0.

thank you guys!

i use a lot of pyrex/cython to bind to libraries - it's so much faster to code in python. it's been a huge boon. having used swig, hand writing wrappers, and pyrex before i can say i much prefer cython.

thank you for the hard work.