Sometimes you just want to compute simple 1D or 2D histograms with regular bins. Fast. No nonsense. Numpy’s histogram functions are versatile, and can handle for example non-regular binning, but this versatility comes at the expense of performance.

The fast-histogram mini-package aims to provide simple and fast histogram functions for regular bins that don’t compromise on performance. It doesn’t do anything complicated - it just implements a simple histogram algorithm in C and keeps it simple. The aim is to have functions that are fast but also robust and reliable. The result is a 1D histogram function here that is 7-15x faster than numpy.histogram, and a 2D histogram function that is 20-25x faster than numpy.histogram2d.