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

[Stanley Seibert]

On Wed, Mar 7, 2018 at 3:22 PM, Andrew Nelson <andyfaff at gmail.com> wrote:

> 1) are there any licence considerations have scipy depend on numba? For
> example, I'm thinking along the lines where someone would have to bundle
> (or link) numba with scipy/numpy, and be forced to use a specific licence.
>

Numba and llvmlite are BSD licensed, and LLVM uses the University of
Illinois/NCSA Open Source license:

https://opensource.org/licenses/UoI-NCSA.php

...which basically looks like the 3-clause BSD license.  This very similar
to SciPy's own license.

2) The size could be an issue for those distributing apps. In a
> conda/virtualenv/python install numba is only required to be installed
> once. However, I have a few standalone python apps frozen using
> PyInstaller. Every time I make one of those it has to freeze numpy, scipy,
> etc, into the app structure. PyInstaller strips out a lot of stuff that
> isn't necessary, but the size of scipy is still large. Having numbda in
> there would increase the size of an app by another 50 Mb if the entirety of
> the package was required. If one could statically link in the required
> bits, then I suppose it's not so bad.
>

llvmlite is already statically linked to the required bits of LLVM, so
there isn't much chance of reducing the size further.  In the situations
where ahead of time compilation is possible, Numba produces shared
libraries which do not require Numba or llvmlite, but the use cases where
that can be done are limited (at the moment).
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