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

[Wes McKinney]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 6:35 AM, Gary Robinson <garyrob at me.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>

I suspect most of the poll respondents see NumPy as representing a lot
more than just a fast ndarray-- i.e. that being able to type

import numpy

is the key to being able to tap the whole scientific Python ecosystem.
I cannot be certain, but the I am willing to bet the percentage of
people who use NumPy and NumPy only relative to the rest of the
scientific Python community is very small.

> 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.
>
>
> --
>
> Gary Robinson
> CTO
> Emergent Discovery, LLC
> personal email: garyrob at me.com
> work email: grobinson at emergentdiscovery.com
> Company: http://www.emergentdiscovery.com
> Blog:    http://www.garyrobinson.net
>
>
>
>
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