AstroPy: High performance ASCII table reader and memory view tables
by Michael Mueller for Python Software Foundation
Currently, the astropy.io.ascii package contains support for reading and writing a number of text-based formats. For simple formats, it would be very useful to have an optimized parser that can efficiently read table data from large files. My proposal will involve implementing fast reading and writing for these formats. It will also include the possibility of implementing memory mapping for ASCII parsers. If all of this is done, I hope to work on general performance enhancement for AstroPy.