Another pandas developer here. Numba can give you similar performance to what you'll see for highly optimized operations in pandas (e.g., for groupby-sum or a

Another pandas developer here. Numba can give you similar performance to what you'll see for highly optimized operations in pandas (e.g., for groupby-sum or a moving average), but you would have to write the low-level loops yourself. Like Wes writes, it's a complementary technology: in principle, the low-level loops in pandas currently written in Cython could be ported to Numba instead. I had a little project where I experimented with this a few years ago: https://github.com/shoyer/numbagg https://github.com/shoyer/numbagg. Since then, I expect numba performance has only improved. Note that this is unlikely to ever happen in pandas itself, for various reasons. The existing routines in Cython already work (and unlike Numba, have a good story for distribution), and the algorithmic core for next version of pandas is being written in C++.