On Mon, Apr 12, 2010 at 4:19 PM, Travis Oliphant <oliphant@enthought.com> wrote:

On Apr 11, 2010, at 4:17 PM, Sebastian Walter wrote:

>
> Ermm, the reply above is quite poor, sorry about that.
> What I meant to say is the following:
>
> If there is going to be a discussion about creating a pure C numpy
> library I'd like to join ;)

Great. I would really like to get the discussion going. In an
ideal world we can finish any kind of significant re-factoring in time
for SciPy this year. It actually feels like the kind of thing that
can motivate NumPy 2.0 a bit better.

It sounds to me like nobody will be opposed as long as there is
continuity to the project and current code still works without
disruption (i.e. the current C-API for Python extensions is available).

I am interested in re-factoring in such a way to create minimal impact
on current NumPy C-API users, but improve maintainability going
forward and the ability for other projects to use NumPy.

My own thoughts were to have a lowlevel 'loop' library that worked with strided memory, and an intermediate level above that for buffer objects. Numpy ufuncs would be a level above that and implement policy type things like casting, kinds, etc.

Then there is the lowlevel c-library for the functions. I don't think we should aim at duplicating commonly available functions like sin and exp, but rather that subset that are sometimes unavailable. In particular, I would like to get away from having to use double versions of functions instead of type specific versions.

Chuck