[Numpy-discussion] numpy gsoc ideas (was: numpy gsoc topic idea: configurable algorithm precision and vector math library integration)

[David Cournapeau]

On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 1:59 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 9:11 AM, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > On Wed, Mar 5, 2014 at 9:11 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:
> >> So this project would have the following goals, depending on how
> >> practical this turns out to be: (1) produce a hacky proof-of-concept
> >> system for doing the above, (2) turn the hacky proof-of-concept into
> >> something actually viable for use in real life (possibly this would
> >> require getting changes upstream into Cython, etc.), (3) use this
> >> system to actually port some interesting numpy code into cython.
> >
> >
> > Having to synchronise two projects may be hard for a GSoC, no ?
>
> Yeah, if someone is interested in this it would be nice to get someone
> from Cython involved too. But that's why the primary goal is to
> produce a proof-of-concept -- even if all that comes out is that we
> learn that this cannot be done in an acceptable manner, then that's
> still a succesful (albeit disappointing) result.
>
> > Otherwise, I am a bit worried about cython being used on the current C
> code
> > as is, because core and python C API are so interwined (especially
> > multiarray).
>
> I don't understand this objection. The whole advantage of Cython is
> that it makes it much, much easier to write code that involves
> intertwining complex algorithms and heavy use of the Python C API :-).

There's tons of bug-prone spaghetti in numpy for doing boring things
> like refcounting, exception passing, and argument parsing.
>

No argument there, doing refcounting, etc.. manually is a waste of time.

Ideally, cython would be used for the boring stuff, and we keep C for the
low-level machinery, but the current code don't cleanly separate those two
layers (there is simple C API for indexing, ufunc, etc...). I am concerned
about cython making that difference even more blurry.

David



>
> -n
>
> --
> Nathaniel J. Smith
> Postdoctoral researcher - Informatics - University of Edinburgh
> http://vorpus.org
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