[SciPy-Dev] Numba as a dependency for SciPy?

[Stanley Seibert]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2018 at 4:30 AM, Juan Luis Cano <juanlu001 at gmail.com> wrote:


> I understand the concerns about numba because it used to work only with
> conda and "it comes from a company" (which some people consider a bad
> thing). numba is no doubt a complex project, but the devs are committed to
> it and the installation and packaging are now few (specially compared to
> the situation we had in 2013). Also, the Julia folks will drive the LLVM
> ecosystem to more platforms I would say.
>

I don't want to strawman the "it comes from a company" argument (which I,
not surprisingly, don't agree with), but I think buried in there is a
concern I do agree with:  It is a risk for a core project to be sponsored
by a single stakeholder.  Companies change strategy, professors lose grant
funding, postdocs move on, and hobbyists burn out and have life-changing
events.  The longevity of the project depends on being able to handle the
disappearance of any core developer (and their sponsor).

So on this front, it is fair to be concerned about Numba, although the
situation is improving.  Right now, the core Numba team consists of 3
Anaconda employees and 2 Intel employees who were recently added for their
automatic multithreading contributions in 2017.  We've been taking notes on
the challenges of onboarding other developers to the code base, and
definitely see the barriers to entry in the code base.  There are things we
will work to improve this year, which will hopefully continue to make it
easier for new developers to get involved.
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