PERF: Cython or C implementation for reading fixed-width files (read_fwf)
As I understand it, read_csv and read_table both use the C parser, but read_fwf uses a pure Python parser. As such, the latter is significantly slower and there doesn't seem to be any workaround. Is there any plan to add an optimized fwf reader?

See: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/pystatsmodels/0DVBmCsDrVI
