What D Needs…

[Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 21 June 2015 at 16:17:57 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
> Contributing to the "What D needs to get traction" debate 
> ongoing in various threads, a bit of feedback from the PyData 
> London 2015 day yesterday (I couldn't get there Friday or 
> today).
>
> Data science folk use Python because of 
> NumPy/SciPy/Matplotlib/Pandas. And IPython (soon to be 
> Jupyter). Julia is on the radar, but…
>
> NumPy is actually relatively easy to crack (it is just an 
> n-dimensional array type with algorithms), which means most of 
> SciPy is straightforward (it just adds stuff on NumPy). 
> Matplotlib cannot be competed against so D needs to ensure it 
> can very trivially interwork with Python and Matplotlib. 
> C-linkage and CFFI attacks much of this, PyD attack much of the 
> rest. This leaves Pandas (which is about time series and 
> n-dimensional equivalents) and Jupyter (which is about creating 
> Markdown or LaTeX documents with embedded executable code 
> fragments).
>
> If D had a library that attacked the capabilities offered by 
> Pandas and could be a language usable in Jupyter, there is an 
> angle for serious usage as long as D performs orders of 
> magnitude faster than NumPy and faster than Cython code.
>
> At the heart of all this is a review of std.parallelism to make 
> sure we
> can get better performance than we currently do.


Thanks for the colour, Russell.

I agree about NumPy and Pandas - the foundations are not so hard 
to replicate (but better!)  John Colvin and Ilya seem to be 
working on this now (and Vlad Levenfeld's stuff too).

I don't know about matplotlib.  It's pretty easy to use D to 
chart using it, but I didn't find it the friendliest library for 
what I wanted to do.  And bokeh is nice for interactivity (which 
is easy to talk to via python, but wouldn't be hard to write a D 
wrapper for - something I made a start on - since it is only 
object representation, and no real hard work on the server side).

Is matplotlib better than mathgl?  (I don't have enough 
experience of either to have a view).

But D is a language usable in Jupyter - I have been playing with 
it for a few days now.  Main thing missing for it to be very 
usable is seeing the compiler output in a pretty manner (well, 
actually just making it visible, would be a start) and making a 
nice way to be able to use dub with PyD/PyDmagic.

If you review std.parallelism, would it be worth adding 
fork/processes there as seems like for some purposes that may be 
better than threading?


Laeeth.