On Apr 16, 2010, at 11:50 PM, Dan Roberts wrote:
Hello NumPy Users,
Hi everybody, my name is Dan Roberts, and my Google Summer of
Code proposal was categorized under NumPy rather than PyPy, so it
will end up being reviewed by mentors for the NumPy project. I'd
like to take this chance to introduce myself and my proposal.
I hadn't prepared for review by the NumPy mentors, but this can
make my proposal stronger than before. With a bit of help from all
of you, I can dedicate my summer to creating more useful code than I
would have previously. I realize that from the perspective of NumPy,
my proposal might seem lacking, so I'd like to also invite the
scrutiny of all of the readers of this list.
Why should we bother reimplimenting anything? PyPy, for those
who are unfamiliar, has the ability to Just-in-Time compile itself
and programs that it's running. One of the major advantages of this
is that code operating on NumPy arrays could potentially be written
in pure-python, with normal looping constructs, and be nearly as
fast as a ufunc painstakingly crafted in C. I'd love to see as much
Python and as little C as possible, and I'm sure I'm not alone in
that wish.
A short introduction: I've been coding in Python for the past
few years, and have increasingly become interested in speeding up
what has become my favorite language. To that end I've become
interested in both the PyPy project and the NumPy projects. I've
spent a fair amount of time frustrating the PyPy developers with
silly questions, written a bit of code for them, and now my GSoC
proposal involves both them, and NumPy.
Finally, I'd like to ask all of you: what features are most
important to you? It's not practical, wise, or even possible for me
to reimpliment more than a small portion of NumPy, but if I can
address the most important parts, maybe I can make this project
useful enough for some of you to use, and close enough for the rest
of you that I can drum up some support for more development in the
future.
My proposal lives at http://codespeak.net/~dan/gsoc/micronumpy.html
thanks for making it this far through my long winded introduction!
I welcome all constructive criticism and thoughts.
Hi Daniel,
This sounds like a great project, and I think it has promise. I
would especially pay attention to the requests to make it easy to
write ufuncs and generalized ufuncs in RPython. That has the most
possibility of being immediately useful.
Your timing is also very good. I am going to be spending some time
re-factoring NumPy to separate out the CPython interface from the
underlying algorithms. I think this re-factoring should help you in
your long-term goals. If you have any input or suggestions while the
refactoring is taking place, we are always open to suggestions and
criticisms.
Thanks for writing a NumPy-related proposal.
Best regards,
-Travis
Thanks,
Daniel Roberts
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--
Travis Oliphant
Enthought Inc.
1-512-536-1057
http://www.enthought.com
oliph...@enthought.com
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