Hi Perry, On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 6:44 AM, Perry Greenfield <perry@stsci.edu> wrote:
I, like Travis, have my worries about C++. But if those actually doing the work (and particularly the subsequent support) feel it is the best language for implementation, I can live with that.
I particularly like the incremental and conservative approach to introducing C++ that was proposed by Mark. What I would like to stress in doing this that all along that process, extensive testing is performed (preferably with some build-bot process) to ensure that whatever C++ features are being introduced are fully portable and don't present intractable distribution issues. Whatever we do, we don't want to go far down that road only to find out that there is no good solution in that regard with certain platforms.
We are particularly sensitive to this issue since we distribute our software, and anything that makes installation of numpy problematic is a very serious issue for us. It has to be an easy install on all common platforms. That is one thing C allowed, despite all its flaws, which is near universal installation advantages over any other language available. If the appropriate subset of C++ can achieve that, great. But it has to be proved continuously as it is incrementally adopted. (I'm not much persuaded by comments like "my experience has shown it not to be a problem")
Is there any disagreement with this?
It's less clear to me what to do about more unusual platforms. It seems to me that some sort of testing against those that may prove important in the future (e.g., gpus?) will be needed, but how to do this is not clear to me.
Your group has been one of the best for testing numpy. What systems do you support at this time? Chuck