[Numpy-discussion] Reminder: weekly status meeting

[Hameer Abbasi]

> On Saturday, Oct 27, 2018 at 12:10 AM, Stefan van der Walt <stefanv at berkeley.edu (mailto:stefanv at berkeley.edu)> wrote:
> On Sat, 27 Oct 2018 10:27:49 +1300, Ralf Gommers wrote:
> > Just to make sure we're talking about the same things here: Stefan, I think
> > with "sparray" you mean "an n-D sparse array implementation that lives in
> > SciPy", nothing more specific? In that case pydata/sparse is the one
> > implementation, and including it in scipy.sparse would make it "sparray".
> > I'm currently indeed leaning towards depending on pydata/sparse rather than
> > including it in scipy.
>
> I want to double check: when we last spoke, it seemed as though certain
> refactorings inside of SciPy (specifically, sparray was mentioned) would
> simplify the life of pydata/sparse devs. That no longer seems to be the
> case?

Hi! I can’t recall having said this, perhaps you inferred it from the docs (it’s on the front page, so that isn’t unreasonable). We should update that sometime.

That said, we use very little of scipy.sparse in PyData/Sparse. When Matt Rocklin was maintaining the project, that was the case, but even in the later days he shifted much of his code to pure NumPy. I followed that path further, not out of unwillingness to depend on it, but out of desire for generality.

In its current state, the only things in PyData/Sparse that depend on scipy.sparse are:
Conversion to/from scipy.sparse spmatrix classes
A bit of linear algebra i.e. dot, tensordot, matmul.

Best Regards,
Hameer Abbasi

>
> If our recommended route is to tell users to use pydata/sparse instead
> of SciPy (for the sparse array object), we probably want to get rid of
> our own internal implementation, and deprecate spmatrix (or, build
> spmatrix on top of pydata/sparse)?
>
> Once we can define a clear API for sparse arrays, we can include some
> algorithms that ingest those objects in SciPy. But, I'm not sure we
> have an API in place that will allow handover of such objects to the
> existing C/FORTRAN-level code.
>
> Stéfan
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