On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 1:25 PM, Sebastien Binet<[email protected]> wrote:
> hi there,
>
> IIRC there was a cython oriented BoF at last week's scipy conference.
>
> anything interesting ?
> (lame attempt at having a good soul summarizing or even just outlining what
> happened for the poor guys from the other side of the big pond)

I thought so, although I was privy to just a part of the conversation.
 Dag or others, feel free to fill in parts that I'm missing.

Rough outline of BoF topics (more of a brain-dump, actually):

Memoryviews & Memoryviewslices (see: http://wiki.cython.org/enhancements/array)
    Dag had an extended conversation with the attendees about the
semantics of these arrays -- when copying should occur, when views
should be taken, etc.

SIMD operations on Cython arrays / Memoryviews
    My impression was that there was general support for this feature,
although this isn't surprising since we were at a numerical computing
conference ;-)  Dag discussed a few possibilities for how it would
work, noting that this particular aspect of Cython arrays would need a
vote & acceptance in the Cython community and core-devs.  A numexpr
backend is one possibility.  Others brought up the possibility of
incoporating OpenMP directives in Cython somehow.  Another thread in
this topic was support for generalized ufuncs in Cython (see:
http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/browser/trunk/doc/neps/generalized-ufuncs.rst),
which very easily extend to SIMD operations.  Dag, you'll have to fill
in here.

fwrap:
    A few of us off in the corner discussed fwrap and what remains to
be done to get the first release out.  The fellas I spoke to work on
Clawpack at the U-Washington, and they're very interested in getting
callbacks working well.  They even offered to pitch in.  So that's
encouraging.

Topics listed but not discussed at the BoF (but certainly worth mentioning ;-):
    C++ & Cython integration -- Damian Eads has a nice C++ Container
<-> Python container tool called Convert-xy (see:
http://code.google.com/p/convert-xy/).  If integrated in Cython, it
could ease the use of STL containers in Cython.
    Weave-like support in Cython -- Fernando Perez (not at the BoF)
suggested that Cython could assume the same functionality of
scipy.weave (see: http://www.scipy.org/Weave), since scipy.weave is
poorly documented and could use more maintenance than it is currently
getting.  I'm personally very interested in this -- it seems that
there is much overlap between scipy.weave and the combination of
pyximport & the pure-python mode of Cython.  It seems that with a bit
of work from an interested user and some guidance from yours truly, we
could improve pyximport & Cython's pure-python mode to incorporate the
good stuff from scipy.weave, but better ;-)  I intend to write-up a
CEP with my thoughts sometime in the near future.

I know there are other topics & significant details that I'm forgetting.

Kurt

>
> cheers,
> sebastien.
> --
> #########################################
> # Dr. Sebastien Binet
> # Laboratoire de l'Accelerateur Lineaire
> # Universite Paris-Sud XI
> # Batiment 200
> # 91898 Orsay
> #########################################
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