Researchers at MIT created Codon, which dramatically increases the speed of Python code by allowing users to run it as effectively as C or C++.

Python is one of the most popular computer languages, but it has a severe Achilles heel; it can be cumbersome compared to lower-level languages like C or C++. To rectify this, researchers from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) set out to change this through the development of Codon. This Python-based compiler allows users to write Python code that runs as efficiently as a program in C or C++.

---

Arsenii Palivoda/iStock.

In order to identify the type at runtime, Saman Amarasinghe, an MIT professor and lead investigator for the CSAIL who is also a co-author of the Codon paper, notes that “if you have a dynamic language [like Python], every time you have some data, you need to keep a lot of additional metadata around it.”