Installation

Install Codon¶

Command-line tool Python package

Use this command to install the Codon CLI that can be used to compile and run programs from the command line:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://exaloop.io/install.sh)"

Follow the prompts to add the codon command to your path.

Use this command to install the codon Python package, which can be used to compile functions in an existing Python codebase:

pip install codon-jit

With this package installed, you can use the @codon.jit decorator. Learn more →

Info

Codon is supported natively on Linux and macOS. If you are using Windows, we recommend using Codon through WSL.

Run your first program¶

With the codon command installed, we can compile and run a simple hello-world program:

print('Hello, World!')

If we save this simple program to a file called hello.py, we can compile and run with the codon run subcommand:

codon run hello.py

which prints the Hello, World! message as expected.

Enable optimizations¶

By default, codon runs programs without optimizations enabled. You can enable optimizations with the -release flag. Let's look at a slightly more involved example to see the effect of this flag:

from time import time

def fib(n):
    return n if n < 2 else fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2)

t0 = time()
ans = fib(40)
t1 = time()
print(f'Computed fib(40) = {ans} in {t1 - t0} seconds.')

This program computes the 40th Fibonacci number using simple recursion. We can run the program with optimizations enabled like this:

codon run -release fib.py

Let's see what happens when we run this program using Python and Codon without optimizations¹:

Command	Time taken (sec.)	Speedup
`python3.13 fib.py`	14.26	1\(\times\)
`codon run fib.py`	0.43	33\(\times\)
`codon run -release fib.py`	0.31	46\(\times\)

That's a 46\(\times\) speedup from using Codon with the -release flag!

Times were measured on an M1 MacBook Pro. ↩