An oldie but goodie deep dive into improving pandas’ csv file parsing by Wes McKinney
TL;DR I’ve finally gotten around to building the high performance parser engine that pandas deserves. It hasn’t been released yet (it’s in a branch on GitHub) but will after I give it a month or so for any remaining buglets to shake out:
That was from way back in October 2012. Since we’re up to pandas 0.10.1 this feature should be pretty stable.