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

[Leonardo Santagada]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 3:36 PM, Peter Cock <p.j.a.cock at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 6:25 PM, Maciej Fijalkowski <fijall at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 4:49 PM, Gary Robinson <garyrob at me.com> wrote:
>>> 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.
>>>
>>
>> It's however clear which approach is harder and more painful. I for
>> one don't subscribe for emulating all the subtleties of CPython C API
>> nor numpy API.
>
> If you do that, you are not porting numpy, and the current code-name
> of micronumpy is quite appropriate ;)
>
> I would be much more interested in (a), since as I understand it
> (b) would only cater to libraries using just numpy's python interface
> (and even there PyPy still has a lot of work to do).

Is any pypy dev interested in (a)? I really don't think there is, so
we might continue discussing the road to take. For games and for a lot
of matrix processing (AI, encription) numpy is good enough. Matplotlib
could be easily ported to pypy, just by dropping some features (AGG
and part of the freetype support code). FFT, blas and a lot of pieces
of scipy just need a pointer to data só they should work (if there is
a ctypes wrapper). Cython is being worked on so when that is ready
parts of sage will just run, as everything else using cython.

Why not move more of scipy to cython/ctypes? That is what you guys
want for the future, and then it would not make anyone have to work on
something they have no interest in.

-- 
Leonardo Santagada