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Welcome to Codon

Codon is a high-performance Python implementation that compiles to native machine code without any runtime overhead. Typical speedups over vanilla Python are on the order of 10-100x or more, on a single thread. Codon's performance is typically on par with (and sometimes better than) that of C/C++. Unlike Python, Codon supports native multithreading, which can lead to speedups many times higher still.

Tip

Think of Codon as Python reimagined for static, ahead-of-time compilation, built from the ground up with best possible performance in mind.

Explore

Getting Started →

Learn how to install Codon and run your first program.

Labs →

Step-by-step guides to learn Codon concepts and features.

Parallelism →

Learn parallel programming in Codon.

API Reference →

Explore built-in types, functions, and modules available in Codon.

Uses

  • Accelerate Python code without having to rewrite it in another language
  • Write multithreaded or GPU code in Python
  • Compile Python code to run on various kinds of hardware, such as edge devices or embedded systems
  • JIT-compile performance-sensitive functions in an existing Python codebase
  • Accelerate and parallelize NumPy code
  • Create Python extensions without using C or Cython

Goals

  • 💡 No learning curve: Be as close to CPython as possible in terms of syntax, semantics and libraries
  • 🚀 Top-notch performance: At least on par with low-level languages like C, C++ or Rust
  • 💻 Hardware support: Full, seamless support for multicore programming, multithreading (no GIL!), GPU and more
  • 📈 Optimizations: Comprehensive optimization framework that can target high-level Python constructs and libraries
  • 🔋 Interoperability: Full interoperability with Python's ecosystem of packages and libraries

Non-goals

  • ❌ Drop-in replacement for CPython: Codon is not a drop-in replacement for CPython. There are some aspects of Python that are not suitable for static compilation — we don't support these in Codon. There are ways to use Codon in larger Python codebases via its JIT decorator or Python extension backend. Codon also supports calling any Python module via its Python interoperability. See also "Differences with Python" in the docs.

  • ❌ New syntax and language constructs: We try to avoid adding new syntax, keywords or other language features as much as possible. While Codon does add some new syntax in a couple places (e.g. to express parallelism), we try to make it as familiar and intuitive as possible.