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

[Gary Robinson]

I wonder if it would be worthwhile to have another poll, this time clearly differentiating between

a) focusing on integrating the existing numpy in such a way that scipy and other such packages are also enabled, probably using the existing project to provide a C interface that IronPython and other Python variants can use; or

b) the current path of replacing much of numpy, making it much faster but leaving scipy out in the cold for quite some time.

I don't think it's clear, at this point, which approach would generate more monetary contributions. I suspect it might be (a) because of commercial scientific research that depends on scipy. Of course, if the path decision is already firm, then such a poll would be moot.

-- 

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




On Oct 19, 2011, at 10:27 AM, Antonio Cuni wrote:

> Hello Gary,
> 
> On 19/10/11 15:38, Gary Robinson wrote:
>>>> You would like pypy+numpy+scipy so that you could write fast
>>>> python-only algorithms and still use the existing libraries.  I
>>>> suppose this is a perfectly reasonable usecase, and indeed
>>>> the current plan does not focus on this.
>>> 
>> 
>> Yes. That is exactly what I want.
> [cut]
> 
> thank you for the input: indeed, I agree that for your usecase the current plan is not the best. OTOH, there is probably someone else for which the current plan is better than others, we cannot make everyone happy at the same time, although we might do it eventually :-).
> 
> By the way, did you ever considered the possibility of running pypy and cpython side-by-side?
> You do your pure-python computation on pypy, then you pipe them (e.g. by using execnet) to a cpython process which does the processing using scipy. Depending on how big the data is, the overhead of passing the data around should not be too high
> 
> It's not ideal, but it might be worth of being tried.
> 
> ciao,
> Anto