[Numpy-discussion] Looking for people interested in helping with Python compiler to LLVM

[Travis Oliphant]

On Mar 11, 2012, at 1:59 AM, Mic wrote:

> what is the difference to http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3146/ ?
> 

To fully expound the difference would take a lot of discussion.   But, summarizing: 

	* Numba is not nearly as ambitious as US (Numba will be fine with some user-directed information and with a subset of the language that gets compiled)
	* Numba will focus on compilation rather than JITing --- in other words it won't be trying to detect hot-spots and compile segments (actually LLVM is not a good candidate for that sort of thing as it is not a very fast or memory-efficient compiler for a lot of reasons,  I believe this is why PyPy does not use it anymore, for example). 
	* Numba will be much closer to Cython in spirit than Unladen Swallow (or PyPy) --- people who just use Cython for a loop or two will be able to use Numba instead
	* Numba will borrow the idea of call-sites from IronPython wherein a function is replaced by a generic function that dispatches based on input types to either cached compiled code for the types specified or the generic function.
	* Numba will be mainly about trying to leverage the code-generation of LLVM which multiple hardware manufacturers are using (Intel's OpenCL support, Nvidia's PTX backend, Apple's CLang, etc.) for NumPy arrays


-Travis





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