Yeah, Numba makes it awesomely easy to write fast functions in Python that release the GIL. You can already do this directly with dask.array by passing a Numba

Yeah, Numba makes it awesomely easy to write fast functions in Python that release the GIL. You can already do this directly with dask.array by passing a Numba compiled function to the map_blocks method: http://dask.readthedocs.org/en/latest/array-api.html#dask.array.core.Array.map_blocks http://dask.readthedocs.org/en/latest/array-api.html#dask.ar... -- it should be pretty straightforward to wrap this with xray.