numba and cython

interesting comparison between numba and cython (and pure python). both projects i want to keep and eye on.

http://jakevdp.github.com/blog/2012/08/24/numba-vs-cython/

pypy woes

i fought mightily to compile some of my existing code with pypy. the docs warn that much of ordinary python is outside of rpython, and they are right. the speed ups i saw with things that pypy could translate to c were indeed impressive, but it was just too hard to shoehorn real-life python into rpython, even for some fairly simple parts of the code. i know this isn't what rpython is for, but i was hoping... maybe i'll try out cython and see if it's better than just writing c for scipy.weave.

cython and sympy

looks like cython is the new coolness for compiling python-ishness to c. they forked from pyrex last year to meet the needs of the sage project, and they seem to have a more active development. plus, they intend to get picked up into the main python distro. and speaking of sage, i remember giving it a spin a while ago. i was impressed at the scope, but i was disappointed at how so many kitchen sinks could bog me down. i think it took more than a day to compile. there's one reason to give sympy a chance. looks like they have some serious support and heavyweight devs (including the author of the original pyginac and one of the authors of the more recent swiginac), so i'm hopeful about where that goes. and they're integrating with sage, too, so it shouldn't be hard to migrate to sage if necessary. sage, meanwhile, looks to be a contender with maple and mathematica. o joyful day! also, a couple of projects use sage-style packages but don't make you install all of them at once: http://code.google.com/p/spdproject/ http://femhub.org/ ...and i found out that matlab now uses mupad instead of maple for its symbolic stuff. interesting.