[Cython] Thoughts on numerical computing/NumPy support

[William Stein]

On 06 Mar 2008 22:36:00 +0100, Dag Sverre Seljebotn
<dagss at student.matnat.uio.no> wrote:
> Nice!, very interesting.
>
>  Myself I couldn't quite put my thoughts about this away and have spent too many hours the past days hacking on Cython source, and software architecture-wise it's been very stimulating. If my interest doesn't fade (which it better if I am to hand in my uni assignments in time...) I might have a prototype of my own ideas in a week, taking a few hours in-between now and then. The end-result should be the same thing, however my approach is very different.
>
>  While pex is probably the way forward I want to pursue my own attempt a little further because I believe a preprocessor can only do so much before it ends up either lacking wanted capabilities because of missing type knowledge etc.

My impression talking to everybody and especially the PEX people is
that *your* approach (not a preprocessor) is probably the way forward.
PEX (and the examples and tests it includes)
is excellent because it lays down a nice implementation that
is actually extremely useful for real work of what we want to be able
to do.  But the actual implementation was basically the easiest
way for the PEX people to get something up and running quickly
without having to change Cython itself (which was an initial design
goal for them for their first version, I think).

> (adding overloaded funtion support?), or duplicating much of what Cython already has. So my approach is instead adding another layer so that it is possible to program Cython at a "higher level" and create plugins for the kinds of thing you would want to preprocess for. (I didn't look up pex yet though....I don't have webaccess now...so I might have jumped to wrong conclusions.)
>
>  My approach is of course very intrusive and the chances of a high enough success for inclusion in Cython is perhaps 10 percent or so (to make something up, and I'm not familiar with Cython processes...). But if you want to have a look it would still be very interesting to discuss with somebody who have taken a different approach...the notes are on the cython wiki (look on recentlychanged for my name...it is a lot of brain dump but should give an idea.)
>

Maybe the first thing you do won't get in as is, but whatever you do I think
it will be very helpful somehow.

In any case, there are currently not enough Cython developers, so I'm
very happy that you are getting involved!

 -- William