I couldn’t disagree more. I find Cython syntax allows me to express the thing I want at the C-level with significantly less work than the equivalent syntax directly in C.
For example consider using cdef to define a simple class (which compiles directly to a struct + helper functions). Organizing it with class-like syntax is so much easier and better mapped to the concept model, and (as it should be) the compiler worries about how to map that concept down to a thin struct with functions (something the programmer should not have to consciously think about but should still benefit from).
You can go really far with this with Cython. For example this is a side project to write a “typeclass”-like pattern for polymorphism in Cython.
The function definitions hardly look different from plain Python, yet you’re getting auto-generated specialized functions for each resolvable child type of the type class (called “Ord” here), plus a dispatcher to invoke them from Python.
So you sort of get just as much type dynamism as plain Python, except each typed instance is much more performant with no PyObject or PyFunction overhead in the call sequence.
For example consider using cdef to define a simple class (which compiles directly to a struct + helper functions). Organizing it with class-like syntax is so much easier and better mapped to the concept model, and (as it should be) the compiler worries about how to map that concept down to a thin struct with functions (something the programmer should not have to consciously think about but should still benefit from).
You can go really far with this with Cython. For example this is a side project to write a “typeclass”-like pattern for polymorphism in Cython.
https://github.com/spearsem/buffersort
The function definitions hardly look different from plain Python, yet you’re getting auto-generated specialized functions for each resolvable child type of the type class (called “Ord” here), plus a dispatcher to invoke them from Python.
So you sort of get just as much type dynamism as plain Python, except each typed instance is much more performant with no PyObject or PyFunction overhead in the call sequence.