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

[Gary Robinson]

> Jacob Hall?n, 18.10.2011 18:41:
>> I'd just like to note that the compelling reason for PyPy to develop numpy
>> support is popular demand. We did a survey last spring, in which an
>> overwhelming number of people asked for numpy support. This indicates that
>> there is a large group of people who will be reap benefits from using PyPy
>> plus Numpy, without specific support for scipy packages.
> 
> Depends on what the question was. Many people say "NumPy", and when you ask 
> back, you find out that they actually meant "SciPy" or at least "NumPy and 
> parts x, y and z of its ecosystem that I commonly use…

I was one of the people who responded to that poll, and I have to say that I fall into the category "they actually meant 'SciPy'…".  I assumed that there would be an interface to numpy that would also support scipy. SciPy has a lot of packages that run various things like SVD very, efficiently because it does them in C. I need access to those packages. I also write my own algorithms. For those, I want to benefit from PyPy's speed and don't necessarily want to make the algorithms fit into numpy's array-processing approach.

So, I NEED SciPy, and would like to also have PyPy, and I'd like to use them together rather than having to separate everything into separate scripts, some of which use CPython/SciPy and some of which use PyPy. In fact, my current code doesn't need NumPy at all except as the way to get to SciPy.

So, I have to say, I am unhappy with the current PyPy approach to NumPy. I'd rather see a much slower NumPy/PyPy integration if that meant being able to use SciPy seamlessly with PyPy.


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Gary Robinson
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