Christopher Barker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Joris De Ridder wrote: >> A related question, just out of curiosity: is there a technical >> reason why Numpy has been coded in C rather than C++? > > There was a fair bit of discussion about this back when the numarray > project started, which was a re-implementation of the original Numeric. > > IIRC, one of the drivers was that C++ support was still pretty > inconsistent across compilers and OSs, particularly if you wanted to > really get the advantages of C++, by using templates and the like. > > It was considered very important that the numpy code base be very portable.
One of the big problems has always been that the C++ application binary interface (ABI) has historically not been all that stable: all the C++ libraries your program used would have to be compiled by the same version of the compiler. That includes Python. You couldn't import an extension module written in C++ compiled with g++ 3.3, say, at the same time as one compiled with g++ 4.0, and your Python would have to been linked with the same version. While the ABI issues (at least on Linux with GCC) are better now, it's still something of a quagmire. -- |>|\/|< /--------------------------------------------------------------------------\ |David M. Cooke http://arbutus.physics.mcmaster.ca/dmc/ |[EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list Numpy-discussion@scipy.org http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
