[SciPy-dev] Ball Tree class

[Jake VanderPlas]

Hello,
I've been using scipy.spatial.KDTree for my research, and found it
very useful.  Recently, though, my datasets have been getting larger -
upwards of 10,000 points in 1000-2000 dimensions.
The KDTree starts getting slow with such a
large dimensionality.  I've addressed this by writing a C++ Ball Tree
code, and wrapping it using swig and numpy.i.  I've been wanting to
begin contributing to the scipy project, and I think this would be a
great place to start.  I'd like to begin the process of adding
this to the scipy.spatial package.

A few questions: Is it preferable to have an
implementation in C rather than C++?  Cython, swig, or hand-wrapped code?
cKDTree is written in Cython, with C.  Should I stick to that
convention to maintain uniformity in the scipy.spatial package?
Please let me know what you think
  -Jake