

NumPy Status Update - wisesage5001
http://morepypy.blogspot.com/2013/12/numpy-status-update-november.html

======
Demiurge
I hate to be that guy, but all it says is that 'more progress has been made on
the NumPy compatibility front'. Progress is great, but am I missing something
news worthy here? Is this a milestone when I can run my numpy 1.4 compatible
processing code on pypy?

------
fijal
I think the way to the HN frontpage is completely random. PyPy 2.2 release
(which features incremental GC and a bunch of cool stuff) was not newsworthy,
a random, not very significant progress report is.

------
craigching
Is there more background context for this? I recently have been getting into
numpy and wondering what I'm missing. So I'm curious about this post, but
wanting more information.

~~~
mattip
PyPy [1] is an alternative implementation of a python interpreter written in
python. It includes a JIT to speed up frequently run code [2]. The canonical
python interpreter is written in c, hence cpython[3], numpy interfaces with
this cpython interpreter through its capi [4]. PyPy has a c api, but it is
"slow" and not JIT friendly. Some of us thought it would be fun to reimplement
the core numpy ndarray as a first-class PyPy object, and allow the JIT to work
its magic. We are 90% of the way there, which means we only have 90% of the
effort left to do.

Most of the basic stuff works, significantly missing are SIMD optimizations
and lazy expression evaluation.

Unfortunately, much scientific python software is written using the cpython
capi, so it will require quite a bit of retooling of things like scipy [5] for
the implementation of numpy on pypy to become popular.

[1] [http://pypy.org](http://pypy.org) [2]
[http://speed.pypy.org](http://speed.pypy.org) [3]
[http://python.org](http://python.org) [4]
[http://docs.python.org/2/c-api](http://docs.python.org/2/c-api) [5]
[http://www.scipy.org/](http://www.scipy.org/)

~~~
craigching
Excellent, thanks much for the response!

