What did you do this week?
This has been a very exciting week for me, with lots of progress made on my GSoC project. For the past couple of months I've been working on adding the new scipy.fft module which supercedes the existing scipy.fftpack submodule and adds a range of new features and interface improvements. Chief among these planned features was a backend system, allowing users to install their own fft libraries as implementations for the scipy.fft interface.
I'm pleased to say that this week, my backend PR was merged into master. scipy.fft can now be implemented by any backend supporting the uarray protocol and provides a range of ways for the user to control their installed backends [1]. Around the same time, it was also announced that I've officially been accepted into the scipy core developers along with one of my mentors - Greg.
But even with my projects main goals out of the way, there are still a number of improvements and stretch goals that I've been working on:
- continued work on a pyFFTW backend which should be merged soon (pyFFTW#269)
- improved normalization of idct/idst which is inconsistent in scipy.fftpack (scipy#10470)
- improved the performance of the n-dimensional FFT interface (scipy#10490)
- a new PR wrapping pypocketfft's new sine and cosine transforms (DCT & DST) (scipy#10493)
What is coming up next?
With the DCT and DST transforms now in pypocketfft, the scipy.fft submodule will no longer depend on scipy.fftpack for any of it's transforms. So, it should be time to flip the dependecy on its head and remove all of the old fortran fftpack code, replacing it with a very thin wrapper around scipy.fft.
I can also work on one of the main stretch goals for this project which was finializing the addition of DCT and DST wrappers to pyFFTW. There has been a PR for this on pyFFTW for many years (pyFFTW#95) but they have lacked the man-power to finally finish it off and merge. Similar to pypocketfft, these real transforms were the
main feature missing from pyFFTW's interfaces.
Did you get stuck anywhere?
No blockers this week.