Travis Oliphant announced this morning at the SciPy 2010 conference that Microsoft is partnering with Enthought to produce a version of NumPy and SciPy for .NET. NumPy and SciPy are Python libraries for scientific computing. Oliphant is the president of Enthought and the original developer of NumPy.
It is possible to call NumPy and SciPy from IronPython now by using IronClad. However, going through IronClad can be inefficient. The new libraries will enable efficient access to NumPy and SciPy from .NET languages and in particular from IronPython.
Here is the official press release from Enthought.
Photo credit: Paul Ivanov
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Michael Foord 07.01.10 at 12:05
How do you measure “very inefficient” with Ironclad? Do you have any metrics?
John 07.01.10 at 15:04
Michael: I haven’t done any timing myself. I’m just repeating what I’ve heard other people say. As I understand it, the overhead of IronClad depends on the amount of work being done. Lots of small small calls will incur more overhead than a few calls that do a lot of work on each call. That’s why I said “can be” rather than “is.” I’ll edit out “very” since I’m not sure.
Paul Ivanov 07.01.10 at 15:21
thanks for the attribution, John.
Michael Foord 07.01.10 at 15:42
Ah. Actually exactly the same is said of numpy / scipy when working with CPython – that in order to minimise overhead you try and set it up so all the work is done in C and as few calls into Python (or vice versa) as possible.
Craig McQueen 07.01.10 at 17:43
I’m not really involved in .NET; my interests are in other areas of Python. So this made me wonder: Does this imply that NumPy Python 3.x support is lower in their priority list than we previously might have thought?
John 07.01.10 at 19:05
Craig: Someone at the conference said that NumPy should run on Python 3.x this summer.
From what Travis said, the Microsoft deal should benefit all NumPy users because a major part of the project will involve refactoring and improving NumPy.
Update: Here’s an announcement (10 July 2010) regarding NumPy, SciPy, and Python 3.
Danny 10.01.10 at 14:59
Hi John,
I was wondering if you knew the schedule for the release this. I read somewhere they would release Numpy first in Nov. Is this correct?
Thanks
John 10.01.10 at 15:20
Danny: I don’t know their schedule, but this summer they said they’d release NumPy first and that SciPy should be relatively easy once NumPy was done.
Younes 12.20.10 at 04:28
It is a very good news. Thank you John,
I am eagerly waiting to see that happened.
Scipy and Numpy are great works that I enjoy using them to do lots of job.
Younes
sooraj 01.12.11 at 02:29
what is new on scipy 2010
i need to know about some optimisation tools
i am a non linear research worker
mail me if u know
my id is sooraj46@gmail.com
asd.and.Rizzo 01.24.11 at 04:32
http://conference.scipy.org/scipy2010/slides/travis_oliphant_keynote.pdf says “Timeline — NumPy by September, SciPy by December”.
Of 2010 or 2011?
asd.and.Rizzo 04.05.11 at 08:23
http://pytools.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=NumPy%20and%20SciPy%20for%20.Net