It does have a peephole optimizer.

numba.jit might be able to optimise the extra copies away though, I'm reasonably sure working with numpy arrays is a pretty significant use case.

There's another project, Pythran, that does that.

I'm not sure if it's doing inlining before the laziness analysis, which would be ideal.

[1]: https://pythran.readthedocs.io/en/latest/INTERNAL.html#lazyn...