The annotated mode is indeed very nice to browse the generated C code, although I still needed to manually read the .c in some cases. The annotated code elides things like the (many thousand lines of) Cython support code; but since few things are documented I sometimes even needed to dig through those, deciphering nested #ifs and whatnot just to see whether the code would be correct.

E.g. what does `cdef char *something = somethingelse` give me. Even if you know the type of somethingelse it's at best a guess. (Bonus question: Say you know somethingelse is going to be a Python bytes object. Does something point to a copy?)