Giles Thomas wrote:
Hi,
At Resolver Systems, we have a product that is written in IronPython - the .NET Python implementation - and allows users to use that language to script a spreadsheet-like interface. Because they're using IronPython, they can access their existing .NET objects and libraries, which has worked out really well for us and for them. But there's an increasing number of users who would like access to CPython C extensions - in particular, NumPy. An IronPython compatible version of NumPy would be great. Of course it could be done by using C# to write NumPy, but I'm not sure that this would really be any less work than creating a "glue" layer that allowed most (or all) C-Python extensions to work with IronPython.
* How do people feel about a source-code-compatible solution, where (perhaps) we would maintain a project that basically provided an alternative makefile for NumPy - or, even better, we could work with the NumPy developers to contribute a .NET/IronPython package.
Hmm.. I don't know enough about C# I guess, but would a different setup.py file really be enough? Would this have some sort of C->C# translator. I would be surprised if that actually worked, though.
*
* Would it be better to try for some kind of "binary compatibility", where we'd write some kind of "glue" that sat between the existing C extension .pyd files and the IronPython engine? Our gut feeling is that this would be much more work, but we might be missing something.
I'm not sure that this would really be any more work than the C->C# translator that you are talking about above, but then again I've never done any C to C# translation.
* What should the work's relationship to the NumPy project be?
This is flexible. It could be distributed with NumPy or else simply advertised by NumPy. Best regards, -Travis Oliphant