Cython 0.26 has finally been released and it comes with some big and several smaller new features, contributed by quite a number of non-core developers.

Probably the biggest addition, definitely codewise, is support for Pythran as a backend for NumPy array expressions, contributed by Adrien Guinet. Pythran understands many usage patterns for NumPy, including array expressions and some methods, and can directly be used from within Cython to compile NumPy using code by setting the directive np_pythran=True . Thus, if Pythran is available at compile time, users can avoid writing manual loops and instead often just use NumPy in the same way as they would from Python. Note that this does not currently work generically with Cython's memoryviews, so you need to declare the specific numpy.ndarray[] types in order to benefit from the translation. Also, this requires the C++ mode in Cython as Pythran generates C++ code.

The other major new feature in this release, and likely with an even wider impact, is pickling support for cdef classes (a.k.a. extension types). This is enabled by default for all classes with Python compatible attribute types, which explicitly excludes pointers and unions. Classes with struct type attributes are also excluded for practical reasons (such as a high code overhead), but can be enabled to support pickling with the class decorator @cython.auto_pickle(True) . This was a long-standing feature for which users previously had to implement the pickle protocol themselves. Since Cython has all information about the extension type and its attributes, however, there was no technical reason why it can't also generate the support for pickling them, and it now does.

As always, there are several new optimisations including speed-ups for abs(complex) , comparing strings and dispatching to specialised function implementations based on fused types arguments. Particularly interesting might be the faster GIL re-entry with the directive fast_gil=True . It tries to remember the current GIL lock state in the fast thread local storage and avoids costly calls into the thread and GIL handling APIs if possible, even when calling across multiple Cython modules.

A slightly controversial change now hides the C code lines from tracebacks by default. Cython exceptions used to show the failing line number of the generated C code in addition to the Cython module code line, now only the latter is shown, like in Python code. On the one hand, this removes clutter that is irrelevant for most users. On the other hand, it hides information that could help developers debug failures from bug reports. For debugging purposes, the re-inclusion of C code lines can now be enabled with a runtime setting as follows:

import cython_runtime cython_runtime.cline_in_traceback=True