dev call 20231207

Dev Call: 12 December 2023

Matti, Florian, Stepan, Antonio, Tim, Du Toit, Petr, Simon

Matti noted that NumPy/HPy fork is based on a pretty out-dated NumPy versions.
Sebastian did a lot of refactoring in NumPy 2.0 which might help NumPy/HPy. However, upgrading the port will be a lot of work and is probably a restart of the migration effort.
Matti found out that the HPyTypeSpec.globals array is not really used in CPython nor is there any test that would use it.
- On CPython, we plan to use the array in future to make them subinterpreter aware
- Anyway, we should enforce the contract in debug mode https://github.com/hpyproject/hpy/issues/462.
Simon thinks that there might be less hurry to move to Python 3.12 and newer than for previous releases. Python 3.12 has some performance regressions and big changes are planned for Python 3.13+ (e.g. nogil) that might take a bit longer than usual to stabilize.

Du Toit is currently working on making cythonized classes work
The internship is moving towards its end so Du Toit is concentrating
The goal is, ofc, to open a PR in the end
Du Toit will still work on Cython/HPy after the internship ended. He plans to work on cdef classes.
Cython benchmarks
- Matti suggests to use regular Python benchmarks (pyperformance) and cythonize them
- Also, if possible we could try to run lxml benchmarks

Petr is working on guidelines
Lots of discussions happening a few of which are relevant to NI; (C API working group; on particular issues for adding new API functions)
Working group is currently discussing things that are mostly at an internal level. Petr will make sure that HPy people are involved in discussions about user (ext author) facing API.
Petr's PEP draft should hopefully be available in the next weeks.

We should create a list of people we think are interested and ask them
Once we know who is interested, we need to decide what's the best venue (eg. PyCon US or EuroPython, etc.)
Then, try to propose a workshop there.