General Improvements: C extension, Py2 Py3 compatibility, Performance

[backbord]

Hi,

I recently experimented with this library and wrote a C extension for it. It is my very first C extension and I had many looks at the great python-blosc C extension (https://github.com/Blosc/python-blosc/blob/master/blosc/blosc_extension.c).

Perhaps you might want to review, rewrite, or even include this pull request into your repo.

• C extension (with fallback to python code)
• Rewrote python code to match C code more closely -- which doubled the performance (on my machine)
• Python 2 and Python 3 compatible (except for the doctests, sorry).

Please feel free to cherry pick. :-)

Best regards, Tim

[thenoviceoof]

Thanks for the PR! I'm a bit swamped with my day job and goals; I'll try to take a look this weekend. Sorry about the delay in communication!

[backbord]

No problem at all -- I hope the PR is somewhat acceptable to you. :)

[backbord]

Hi, any news on this PR? :)

[sscherfke]

Any chance this PR will get merged?

[sscherfke]

@backbord we should try to make it compatible with py37 (see https://github.com/thenoviceoof/base92/issues/8) :)