On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 11:39 PM, Travis Oliphant
<travis@continuum.io> wrote:
Mark Wiebe and I have been discussing off and on (as well as talking with Charles) a good way forward to balance two competing desires:
* addition of new features that are needed in NumPy
* improving the code-base generally and moving towards a more maintainable NumPy
I know there are load voices for just focusing on the second of these and avoiding the first until we have finished that. I recognize the need to improve the code base, but I will also be pushing for improvements to the feature-set and user experience in the process.
As a result, I am proposing a rough outline for releases over the next year:
* NumPy 1.7 to come out as soon as the serious bugs can be eliminated. Bryan, Francesc, Mark, and I are able to help triage some of those.
* NumPy 1.8 to come out in July which will have as many ABI-compatible feature enhancements as we can add while improving test coverage and code cleanup. I will post to this list more details of what we plan to address with it later. Included for possible inclusion are:
* resolving the NA/missing-data issues
* finishing group-by
* incorporating the start of label arrays
* incorporating a meta-object
* a few new dtypes (variable-length string, varialbe-length unicode and an enum type)
* adding ufunc support for flexible dtypes and possibly structured arrays
* allowing generalized ufuncs to work on more kinds of arrays besides just contiguous
* improving the ability for NumPy to receive JIT-generated function pointers for ufuncs and other calculation opportunities
* adding "filters" to Input and Output
* simple computed fields for dtypes
* accepting a Data-Type specification as a class or JSON file
* work towards improving the dtype-addition mechanism
For some of these things it's not entirely (or at all, what's a meta-object?) clear to me what they mean or how they would work. How do you plan to go about working on these features? One NEP per feature?
Ralf