On Thu, Feb 9, 2012 at 2:25 PM, Andrew McNabb <amcnabb@mcnabbs.org> wrote:
On Thu, Feb 09, 2012 at 08:53:55PM +0100, Stefan Behnel wrote:
AFAIK, there is no concrete roadmap towards supporting SciPy on top of PyPy. Currently, PyPy is getting its own implementation of NumPy-like arrays, but there is currently no interaction with anything in the SciPy world outside of those. Given the shear size of SciPy, reimplementing it
on
top of numpypy is unrealistic.
I understand that there is some hope in getting cython to support pure python and ctypes as a backend, and then to migrate scipy to use cython. This is definitely a long-term solution.
Most people don't depend on all of scipy, and for some use cases, it's not too hard to find alternatives. Today I migrated a project from scipy to the GNU Scientific Library (with ctypes). It now works great with PyPy, and I saw a total speedup of 10.6. Dropping from 27 seconds to 2.55 seconds is huge. It's funny, but for a new project I would go to great lengths to try to use the GSL instead of scipy (though I'm sure for some use cases it wouldn't be possible).
Hm... is there a reason GSL and SciPy need to compete? Can't SciPy incorporate GSL? -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)