Ralf Juengling wrote:
I believe that, currently, when somebody decides to move a significant portion of numerical code from Python to C, he or she will likely end up writing (specialized versions of) things like 'sum', and 'dot'. But shouldn't those things be provided by an programming environment for scientific computing?
Does Scipy have, for instance, a documented C interface to blas and lapack functions? You answer, "Well, there is CBLAS and CLAPACK already." Yes, but by the same argument that pushes Travis to reconsider what should go into scipy_core: it would be nice to be able to use the blas_lite and lapack_lite functions if they cover my needs, and to tell my client, "All else you need to have installed is Python and scipy_core."
I am not sure about the particular case Ralf is considering, but in the past I have been in the situation that I wanted to access algorithms in Numerical Python (such as blas or lapack) at the C level and I couldn't find a way to do it. Note that for ranlib, the header files are actually installed as Numeric/ranlib.h, but as far as I know it is not possible to link a C extension module to Numerical Python's ranlib at the C level. So I would welcome what Ralf is suggesting. --Michiel