On Tue, May 25, 2010 at 4:31 PM, David Cournapeau
On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 4:37 AM, Travis Oliphant
wrote: Hi everyone,
There has been some talk about re-factoring NumPy to separate out the Python C-API layer and make NumPy closer to a C-library. I know there are a few different ideas about what this means, and also that people are very busy. I also know there is a NumPy 2.0 release that is in the works.
I'm excited to let everyone know that we (at Enthought) have been able to find resources (about 3 man months) to work on this re-factoring project and Scott and Jason (both very experienced C and Python programmers) are actively pursuing it. My hope is that NumPy 2.0 will contain this re-factoring (which should be finished just after SciPy 2010 --- where I'm going to organize a Sprint on NumPy which will include at least date-time improvements and re-factoring work).
This sounds great. As for how this is to be done, what would be the numpy aspects to be worked on first ? The obvious candidates are broadcasting, indexing, and ufunc ?
If it was ufuncs alone it could be broken out into a separate project where ufuncs operated on objects that exposed the buffer interface. This would keep it separate from from numpy and at some point we could drop it into numpy trunk. If things went that way it would also make sense to drop support for versions of python that don't support the new buffer protocol. Speaking of which, can the datetime types be supported with the buffer interface? If not, there is some design work to be done there as to how to use the buffer interface for new types. <snip> Chuck