On Aug 26, 2009, at 11:23 AM, Dag Sverre Seljebotn wrote: > As many of you know me and Kurt attended SciPy 09. Four Cython-related > events were held: > > - An introductory tutorial to Cython (by me) > - A talk about Cython for numerics (by me again) > - A talk on Fwrap (by Kurt) > - A Cython BoF > > You can find links to slides and videos for the three first on > http://conference.scipy.org. > > An intensive week like that makes me reflect on what Cython is good > about, lacking, etc. etc. > > First of all, there seems to be quite a lot of interest in Cython, > many > thinks it is excellent, and many thanked me personally for our > efforts. > > One thing that's also very interesting to me personally is that > there's > some talk of porting parts of NumPy over to Cython for easier Python 3 > support.
Sounds like things went really well. > Beyond that, I've got a nice list of topics for further > improvement. For > instance one thing that is very possible to fix was a real dealbreaker > that some complained about, and in one case stopped somebody from > recommending it to co-workers. It's always nice to get the "outside" > perspective that I get when I present Cython to lots of people. > > BUT, I'm going to wait a little with presenting that list. It simply > feels too depressing to discuss lots of new ideas etc. without dealing > properly with how such ideas can ever be brought to life. In the end, > what matters right now is to stabilize -unstable, get the GSoC work > merged in, and get 0.12 released; which at the current pace should > keep > us busy for some months to come. > > On that note though: It seems to me that many has the impression that > > a) Cython is complicated technology which takes much work > b) A lot of effort is put into steadily improving it > > BUT, I feel the reality is that > > a) Core developers can implement new features or fix bugs rather > quickly > b) Relatively little time is spent in total on Cython, compared to > some > other projects > > I don't mean to belittle the efforts Robert and Stefan and others have > put into Cython; I just feel that the amount of work going on in > Cython > is really less than people think it is. > > Or put another way: Putting relatively little in can, at least at this > point in Cython's development, yield high returns. [...] > Thoughts on the picture I'm painting? I think you've hit the nail on the head here. Personally, there are tons of things I'd love to do with Cython (many of which you've listed), and I think it's headed in a very cool direction, but what time I have is mostly going to higher-priority tasks like work and school and 6 month old twin girls. (Also, for the moment, as fun as hacking on Cython is, it unfortunately doesn't directly contribute to thesis or job.) I'm confident that in the long term (say, looking at the next year or maybe two) - Robert _______________________________________________ Cython-dev mailing list [email protected] http://codespeak.net/mailman/listinfo/cython-dev
