[Numpy-discussion] Spyke : moving forward

[Rahul Garg]

Thanks everyone for suggestions and enthusiasm.

1. For type declarations moving from string based annotations to  
decorators for functions.

(Function annotations in 3k: Well it should be easy to add them once  
that feature comes out.)

2. License : Keeping it as GPLv3 for compiler. The "runtime" is just a  
python script that invokes the real compiler binary and can be  
licensed under LGPL or  BSD if thats what people prefer.

3. Release : Will release source+binary in 2-3 weeks. Need to get some  
stuff sorted at uni. Please be patient :)

4. Will establish a testsuite at google code in a couple of days.  
Everyone is encouraged to contribute test cases whether big or small.  
Having a proper test suite will mean we can better track the bugs and  
features in the compiler on a daily basis.

Are there any suggestions on how the test suite should be organized?
I want a test suite where we have lets say N tests and a script runs  
all N tests and compares the expected output and says "pass/fail" for  
each one of them.

Also what license is suitable for testsuite? The code will remain 100%  
pure Python so I believe any license can be chosen.

5. Interop with C : I am thinking of a module which wraps the  
functionality of ctypes with some added type declarations. But this  
wont work anytime soon.

6 Invoking compiler at runtime instead of as a standalone compiler : I  
had not thought of invoking Spyke at runtime through the decorator. So  
currently Spyke is invoked standalone from the commandline. But now  
that we are adding decorators,  as suggested by Travis and others I  
will look into how to invoke compiler directly from the decorator.

7. Support for classes : Basic support for classes but the code  
generated currently for classes is pretty slow. No support for  
exceptions currently.

8. Long term plans : I intend to use Spyke as a platform for some  
research into compiler optimizations. From time to time I may play  
with some things but those will be kept out of the trunk.

thanks,
rahul