[Numpy-discussion] Proposed Roadmap Overview

[David Cournapeau]

On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 9:28 AM, Mark Wiebe <mwwiebe at gmail.com> wrote:

> Is there anyone who uses a blue gene or small device which needs up-to-date
> numpy support, that I could talk to directly? We really need a list of
> supported platforms on the numpy wiki we can refer to when discussing this
> stuff, it all seems very nebulous to me.

They may not need an up to date numpy version now, but if stopping
support for them is a requirement for C++, it must be kept in mind. I
actually suspect Travis to have more details on the big iron side of
things. On the small side of things:
http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/ticket/1969

This may seem like not very useful - but that's part of what a open
source project is all about in my mind.

>
> Particular styles of using templates can cause this, yes. To properly do
> this kind of advanced C++ library work, it's important to think about the
> big-O notation behavior of your template instantiations, not just the big-O
> notation of run-time. C++ templates have a turing-complete language (which
> is said to be quite similar to haskell, but spelled vastly different)
> running at compile time in them. This is what gives template
> meta-programming in C++ great power, but since templates weren't designed
> for this style of programming originally, template meta-programming is not
> very easy.

scipy.sparse.sparsetools is quite straightforward in its usage of
templates (would be great if you could suggest improvement BTW, e.g.
scipy/sparse/sparsetools/csr.h), and does not by itself use any
meta-template programming.

I like that numpy can be built in a few seconds (at least without
optimization), and consider this to be a useful feature.

cheers,

David