PyPy’s call for donations (NumPy)

Disclaimer: I am not at all involved with PyPy development, planning,or management. You are about to see cheer-leading, but it’s not because this is my project.

PyPy has recently posted  ”Call for donations - PyPy to support Numpy!” There has been some initial ground work laid by Alex Gaynor and others, but it looks like they’re ready to go full speed ahead with the effort now. This is great news for PyPy and Python.

NumPy is one of the defacto scientific computing packages in the Python ecosystem. There are all kinds of other modules that depend on NumPy, and it’s used heavily in research, engineering, and other general sciency stuff.

PyPy is speedy alternative implementation of Python. In many cases, PyPy is able to handily whallop traditional CPython. As of the time of this article’s writing, PyPy’s speed center says “The geometric average of all benchmarks is 0.21, or 4.9 times faster than CPython”.

So… why do I care?

CPython, being an interpreted language, often falls behind other closer-to-the-metal languages and compilers. The scientific community, along with a good number of other modules rely on NumPy. The problem is, CPython isn’t nearly as fast as some of the alternative languages. However, what Python loses in speed, it makes up for in ease-of-use and readability.

With a PyPy-compatible NumPy, we can greatly reduce our speed woes, and open up PyPy compatibility with a very large set of existing modules. The end result being PyPy is one step closer to being ready for everyday use, and it also gets a “killer package”.

Lots of drops in the bucket = ??

There’s only so much we, as individuals can do financially, but do consider making a small donation to the cause. The Python community is large, and contributions will quickly accumulate to something useful. For those who are firmly entrenched in CPython, consider what an aggressive, experimental Python implementation does for the greater Python ecosystem (subject for another post or discussion).