[pypy-dev] Questions on the pypy+numpy project

[Leonardo Santagada]

On Tue, Oct 18, 2011 at 11:05 AM, Ian Ozsvald <ian at ianozsvald.com> wrote:
>> As an example - I want numpy for client work. For my clients (the main
>> being a physics company that is replacing Fortran with Python) numpy
>> is at the heart of their simulations. However - numpy is used with
>> matplotlib and pyCUDA and parts of scipy. If basic tools like FFT
>> aren't available *and compatible* (i.e. not new implementations but
>> running on tried, trusted and consistent C libs) then there'd be
>> little reason to use pypy+numpy. pyCUDA could be a longer term goal
>> but matplotlib would be essential.
>
> Hi David, Fijal. I'll reply to this earlier post as the overnight
> discussion doesn't seem to have a good place to add this.
>
> Someone else (I can't find a name) posted this nice summary:
> http://blog.streamitive.com/2011/10/17/numpy-isnt-about-fast-arrays/
> which mostly echoes my position.

Yes and pypy numpy does support dtype IIUC so in the end it will have
all the features of numpy described in the article, it is going to be
one interface to all the libraries to talk to, but it  is not going to
be the same as cpython numpy. I don't think it is impossible to have
an easy path for people to support both cpython numpy and pypy numpy
on the same lib (either using cython or a simple C API). Maybe a easy
to do is to make something like cpyext just for numpy api, and then
latter agree on a common api for both, or to make cython to generate
the correct one for each interpreter.



-- 
Leonardo Santagada