Would it be fair to say then, that you are expecting the discussion about C++ will mainly arise after the Mark has written the code? I can see that it will be easier to specific at that point, but there must be a serious risk that it will be too late to seriously consider an alternative approach.
We will need to see examples of what Mark is talking about and clarify some of the compiler issues. Certainly there is some risk that once code is written that it will be tempting to just use it. Other approaches are certainly worth exploring in the mean-time, but C++ has some strong arguments for it.
Compilers for C++98 are now stable enough (except on Bluegene, see the Boost distribution with xlc++) C++ helps a lot to enhance robustness.ts?
From my perspective having a standalone core NumPy is still a goal. The primary advantages of having a NumPy library (call it NumLib for the sake of argument) are
1) Ability for projects like PyPy, IronPython, and Jython to use it more easily 2) Ability for Ruby, Perl, Node.JS, and other new languages to use the code for their technical computing projects. 3) increasing the number of users who can help make it more solid 4) being able to build the user-base (and corresponding performance with eye-balls from Intel, NVidia, AMD, Microsoft, Google, etc. looking at the code).
The disadvantages I can think of: 1) More users also means we might risk "lowest-commond-denominator" problems --- i.e. trying to be too much to too many may make it not useful for anyone. Also, more users means more people with opinions that might be difficult to re-concile. 2) The work of doing the re-write is not small: probably at least 6 person-months 3) Not being able to rely on Python objects (dictionaries, lists, and tuples are currently used in the code-base quite a bit --- though the re-factor did show some examples of how to remove this usage). 4) Handling of "Object" arrays requires some re-design.
I'm sure there are other factors that could be added to both lists.
-Travis
Thanks a lot for the reply,
Matthew _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
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