Re: [boost] New Astronomy Library

Subject: Re: [boost] New Astronomy Library
From: Pranam Lashkari (plashkari628_at_[hidden])
Date: 2018-02-22 19:07:00

Yes maybe you are right.
This idea does not seem promising for the community so i should drop this
idea here and focus on something better.

Thank you.
Pranam Lashkari.

On 22-Feb-2018 10:25 PM, "Hans Dembinski" <hans.dembinski_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> Hi Pranam,
>
> > On 22. Feb 2018, at 15:14, Pranam Lashkari via Boost <
> boost_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> >
> > Sorry for taking too long to replay as I was talking to one of my friends
> > who is a scientist and works in an observatory.
> >
> > I completely agree with you that scientist would not move from Python to
> > C++ easily. But Astronomical data are getting bigger in size and Python
> > takes too much time to compute them (according to my scientist friend).
> > That's where C++ can be a dramatic improvement.
>
> I am a scientist and I work in the field of (astro)particle physics. I
> also happen to know one of the leading developers of gammapy and astropy.
>
> I think that "Python takes too much time to compute" is not a good
> argument for your project. Most of the computation in packages like astropy
> and gammapy is based on numpy which is very fast. And where it is not fast
> enough, people who already use Python will rather use acceleration
> techniques such as Cython and Numba. C++ is a hard language, difficult to
> learn and almost impossible to master. As a scientist you want to spend a
> maximum of time doing science, and a minimum amount of time understanding
> computer code and the lovely error messages that template-heavy code
> produces. Also keep in mind that science is about short-term projects with
> a high fluctuation of personell. The ease of using and learning Python in
> this context greatly outweighs potential performance issues. As a project
> leader, you don't want to spend many months getting the new people up to
> speed with tricky software. You would clearly prefer Python solutions over
> C++ solutions whenever possible.
>
> In summary, no, I don't think that a C++ astronomy library in Boost will
> be a hit. I recommend you join forces with astropy, ask them which
> algorithms are slow, and try to speed them up by writing them in C++, using
> Boost.Python or pybind11 for the Python bindings.
>
> Best regards,
> Hans