💡 "Compiling" workflows or macros

[liamhuber]

There is some overhead to using the node structure for things, with the benefit of flexibility, breakpoints, reusing nodes in different contexts, parallelization, etc. But what if you have a workflow/macro that you're simply really happy with and want it to run as effectively as possible?

We now provide direct access to Function nodes' node_function method as a class property; in principle it should be possible to recursively "compile" macros so that instead of building nodes, they're just a function that leverages their childrens' node_function and completely hard wires how the IO gets passed between them. I.e. turn the thing into a single big python function. You would lose basically all the benefits, but gain speed from ditching the node communication.

In some cases it might be possible to go a step further and Cython the whole thing at the end to crank out even more speed.

Right now this is still a distant dream, but it's a possible goal to keep in mind.