Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/890231/

On his blog, Stefan Behnel writes about the 20th anniversary of Cython, which is a compiler for Python extensions written in C, for wrapping C libraries in order to provide Python bindings for them, and for embedding Python into other applications. It is used by NumPy, scikit-learn (and other scikit-* extensions), pandas, and more.

On April 4th, 2002, Greg Ewing published the first release of Pyrex 0.1.

Already at the time, it was invented and designed as a compiler that extended the Python language with C data types to build extension modules for CPython. A design that survived the last 20 years, and that made Pyrex, and then Cython, a major corner stone of the Python data ecosystem. And way beyond that.

Now, on April 4th, 2022, its heir Cython is still very much alive and serves easily hundreds of thousands of developers worldwide, day to day.