Yes, that's my concern. I take it as given that the CL community does not have the resources to fully reimplement numpy from scratch. If one grants me that premise, then building a FFI to numpy would be a better investment of hours than cloning it.

Arguably investing in py4cl would be better than either. But other than for personal satisfaction, cloning is a dominated choice.

I was hoping to hear that someone had gone over the C API with CFFI.

That leads me to a follow-up question: am I right that SWIG no longer ships with a back end for emitting CFFI stubs? It seems like it was dropped sometimes between versions 3 and 4.

Best,
R

On 10 Apr 2023, at 16:16, Marco Antoniotti wrote:

IMHO, it'd be easier and effective to band up together and FIRST write a proper API specification and THEN implement it in CL.

But Common Lispers are like academics: the "herding cats" applies.

Cheers

Marco

PS I am a Common Lisper AND an academic. You know what I mean...

On Mon, Apr 10, 2023 at 9:09 PM Robert Goldman <rpgoldman@sift.info> wrote:

Has anyone taken the Numpy C API and created a CFFI library based on it? I see some attempts to clone it in pure CL, but I would guess that just using it through its API might be easier and more effective.