[Numpy-discussion] Funded work on Numpy: proposed improvements and request for feedback

[Charles R Harris]

On Tue, Aug 4, 2009 at 3:24 PM, Bruce Southey <bsouthey at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 3, 2009 at 9:42 PM, David
> Cournapeau<david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> >    I (David Cournapeau) and the people at Berkeley (Jarrod Millman,
> > Fernando Perez, Matthew Brett) have been in discussion so that I could
> > do some funded work on NumPy/SciPy. Although they are obviously
> > interested in improvements that help their own projects, they are
> > willing to make sure the work will impact numpy/scipy as a whole. As
> > such we would like to get some feedback about the proposal.
> >
> > There are several areas we discussed about, but the main 'vision' is to
> > make more of the C code in numpy reusable to 3rd parties, in particular
> > purely computational (fft, linear algebra, etc...) code. A first draft
> > of the proposal is pasted below.
> >
> > Comments, request for details, objections are welcomed,
> >
> > Thank you for your attention,
> >
> > The Berkeley team, Gael Varoquaux and David Cournapeau
> >
>
> [snip]
>
>
> Almost a year ago Travis send an email :
> 'Report from SciPy'?
> http://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/2008-August/036909.html
>
> Of importance was that
> " * NumPy 2.0 will be a library and will not automagically import numpy.fft
>  * We will suggest that other libraries use from numpy import fft
> instead of import numpy as np; np.fft
> "
>
> I sort of see that the proposed work could help make numpy a library
> as a whole but it is not clear that the work is heading towards that
> goal. So if numpy 2.0 is still planned as a library then I would like
> to see a clearer statement towards that goal.
>
> Not really understanding the problems of C99, but I know that trying
> to cover all the little details can be very time consuming when more
> effort could be spent on things.
> So if 'C99-like' is going to be the near term future, is there any
> point in supporting non-C99 environments with this work?


Windows? I don't know the status of the most recent MSVC compilers, but they
haven't been c99 compliant in the past and compliance doesn't seem to be a
priority. Other compilers are a mixed bag. This is the git conundrum:
support isn't sufficiently widespread on all platforms to make the
transition so we are stuck with the lowest common denominator.

Chuck
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/attachments/20090804/7a114f35/attachment.html>