[Matrix-SIG] Re: blitz++ vs. NumPy?

[Konrad Hinsen]

> I am aware of the concerns you expressed. Like I said, I will look into it.
> I was just remarking in my most recent post that performance would not be
> the primary reason for wanting to wrap Blitz, as others had assumed or
> argued.

It is not even clear that a Blitz-based system would be faster (let
alone significantly) than the current implementation. I totally agree
that the biggest problem with NumPy is maintenance - it's a lot of
code, and not particularly "reader-friendly".

> BTW, several people have encountered strange problems that eventually traced
> back to the inclusion of a version of the BLAS in NumPy. I mentioned before
> that including such things in the main package is a mistake, but gave in to
> your argument that convenience for naive users mattered more. None of this
> is very easy to decide.

Once the DistUtils SIG has done its job (it's just starting!),
NumPy packaging should be reconsidered. It would then be no more effort
to install three packages at once than to install just a single one.

What exactly where the BLAS-related problems? I know that f2c-compiled
code is in principle not 100% portable C code, but I have never had
any problems in practice, although I have used it on most of the popular
Unix platforms.

Konrad.
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