[Numpy-discussion] My GSoC Proposal to Implement a Subset of NumPy for PyPy

[David Cournapeau]

Hi Dan,

On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 1:50 PM, Dan Roberts <ademan555 at gmail.com> 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.

Thanks for proposing a NumPy-related project !

>     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.

First, an aside: with the recent announcement from pypy concerning the
new way of interfacing with C, wouldn't it make more sense to go the
other way around  - i.e. starting from full numpy, and replace some
parts in rpython ? Of course, this assumes that numpy can work with
pypy using the new C API "emulation", but this may not be a lot of
work. This would gives the advantage of having something useful from
the start.

I think this project is extremely interesting in nature, and the parts
which are the most interesting to implement are (IMHO of course):
  - indexing, fancy indexing
  - broadcasting
  - basic ufunc support, although I am not sure how to plug this with
the C math library for math functions (cos, log, etc...)

Especially for indexing and broadcasting, even if your project
"fails", having a pure, reference python implementation would be
tremendously useful - in particular for the use in sparse arrays as
mentioned by Stefan.

cheers,

David