[Python-ideas] Python 3000 TIOBE -3%

[Andrew McNabb]

On Thu, Feb 09, 2012 at 08:53:55PM +0100, Stefan Behnel wrote:
> 
> AFAIK, there is no concrete roadmap towards supporting SciPy on top of
> PyPy. Currently, PyPy is getting its own implementation of NumPy-like
> arrays, but there is currently no interaction with anything in the SciPy
> world outside of those. Given the shear size of SciPy, reimplementing it on
> top of numpypy is unrealistic.

I understand that there is some hope in getting cython to support pure
python and ctypes as a backend, and then to migrate scipy to use cython.
This is definitely a long-term solution.

Most people don't depend on all of scipy, and for some use cases, it's
not too hard to find alternatives.  Today I migrated a project from
scipy to the GNU Scientific Library (with ctypes).  It now works great
with PyPy, and I saw a total speedup of 10.6.  Dropping from 27 seconds
to 2.55 seconds is huge.  It's funny, but for a new project I would go
to great lengths to try to use the GSL instead of scipy (though I'm sure
for some use cases it wouldn't be possible).


> That being said, it's quite possible to fire up CPython from PyPy (or vice
> versa) and interact with that, if you really need both PyPy and SciPy. It
> even seems to be supported through multiprocessing. I find that pretty cool.
> 
> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.pypy/9159/focus=9161

That's a fascinating idea that I had never considered.  Thanks for
sharing.

--
Andrew McNabb
http://www.mcnabbs.org/andrew/
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