[Pandas-dev] Rewriting some of internals of pandas in C/C++? / Roadmap

[Irwin Zaid]

Hi all,

Stephan Hoyer asked me to comment on DyND and it's relation to the changes
in Pandas that we're discussing here, so I'd like to do that. But, before I
do, I want to clear up some misconceptions about DyND's history from Wes'
most recent email.

To be 100% open and transparent (in the spirit of pandas's new
> governance docs): Before committing to using DyND in any binding way
> (i.e. required, as opposed to opt-in) in pandas, I'd really like to
> see more evidence from 3rd parties without direct financial interest
> (i.e. employment or equity from Continuum) that DyND is "the future of
> Python array computing"; in the absence of significant user and
> community code contribution, it still feels like a political quagmire
> leftover from the Continuum-Enthought rift in 2011.
>

Let's be very clear about the history (and present) of DyND -- and I think
Travis Oliphant captured it well in his email to the NumPy list some months
ago:
https://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/2015-August/073412.html

DyND was started as a personal project of Mark Wiebe in September 2011, and
you can see the first commit at
https://github.com/libdynd/libdynd/commit/768ac9a30cdb4619d09f4656bfd895ab2b91185d.
At the time, Mark was at the University of British Columbia. He joined
Continuum part-time when it was founded in January 2012, and later became
full-time in the spring of 2012. DyND, therefore, predates Continuum and
never had any relationship with Enthought. As Travis said in his email to
the NumPy list (link above), after that "Continuum supported DyND with some
fraction of Mark's time". Mark can speak more about this if he wishes, but
the point is that DyND's origins are not "a political quagmire leftover
from the Continuum-Enthought rift in 2011". Also, Mark left Continuum in
December 2014, so everything contributed after that had nothing to do with
Continuum.

Now let's move to the other main DyND developers, me and Ian Henriksen.

Until June 29, 2015, I had no relationship with Continuum, Enthought, or
even the people we're speaking about in this thread. I knew Mark and that
was it. I started working on DyND in January 2014, meaning I contributed to
it just by choice for 1.5 years. And, if you look at my commit
contributions at https://github.com/libdynd/libdynd/graphs/contributors,
you'll see that represents about 50% of all of my contributions. And I've
contributed a lot.

Ian was originally a Google Summer of Code student that DyND applied for as
an open-source project, through NumFOCUS, in the summer of 2015. He started
on May 25, 2015 and went until the end of August. Anything he contributed
in this time had nothing to do with Continuum. He formally joined Continuum
on September 1, 2015.

So, basically, a majority of DyND's commits were given freely by Mark,
myself, and Ian.

Now, at present, both Ian and I are sponsored by Continuum. And, yes, they
are very graciously supporting us to work on DyND, like they did in the
past with Mark. While I understand that, in theory, that could potentially
be a conflict of interest, let me be very clear about one thing: Continuum
has always approached DyND in a very balanced way, letting it grow as it
needs while encouraging interaction with Pandas and other open-source
projects in the ecosystem. The decisions we make for DyND have been
decisions we've taken for the good of the project.

And, yes, the eventual goal of DyND is to move from incubation at Continuum
to a NumFOCUS-sponsored project. And we'll do that as soon as we can.

Irwin
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