Wow. The first version of this PR used Cython memoryviews, which added a whopping 14 kLOC of generated C to the repo. Switched back to bare pointers to keep the compile times within bounds. It would be interesting to hear the Cython team's point of view on that. @sturlamolden @robertwb @markflorisson88 @dagss
The priority has always been to produce the most optimized runtime code, with compile time being way down on the list of priorities, if even thought about at all. This means that there's likely a lot of low-hanging fruit for those who find the compile time too slow (do you have some specific stats?). Also, while Cython generates very verbose C code, much of it is optimized away. While the lines-of-code and compile times are related, they should not be conflated. The recently added common_utility_include_dir option to cythonize(...) might help as well--it allows utility code to be shared across multiple generated files. Perhaps a faster -c dbg option for development would be handy. - Robert