[SciPy-Dev] Work on fwrap and SciPy

[Dag Sverre Seljebotn]

This is just a quick note to inform people that I am currently working 
with Enthought to bring SciPy to the .NET platform. In particular, I 
will work on the Fortran parts of SciPy.

The primary strategy will be to improve fwrap enough to make it usable 
for SciPy, and then move SciPy over to fwrap instead of f2py. The point 
here is that Carl Witty is already working on a .NET backend for Cython, 
and since fwrap generates Cython code we get the .NET port that way.

All work is done in Enthought's "refactor" branches for now [1]. The 
intention is certainly to merge back to main eventually, but questions 
of how or when or whether will have to wait; getting things up and 
running on .NET has priority.

Some details:

  a) The most important missing feature in fwrap is callbacks. I'm sure 
there are other things I'll have to implement as well.

  b) The main strategy is to first move (our own branch of) SciPy over 
to fwrap and have that work on CPython, and then move to compiling 
things on .NET

  c) fwrap does not support g77, only Fortran 90 compilers like 
gfortran/ifort etc. For the purposes of the .NET port this is likely to 
be good enough. Before a merge with the main CPython branch one must 
perhaps look into implementing g77 support in fwrap. I know that David 
C. at least earlier stated that g77 support is not going away anytime 
soon. Feedback on this welcome.

Dag Sverre

[1]
http://github.com/teoliphant/numpy-refactor
http://github.com/jasonmccampbell/scipy-refactor