OSS Roundup

This is the first in an ongoing series of articles in which we will give weekly highlights of open-source software (OSS) activities here at Anaconda. We will list various achievements of the last week or so, link to interesting things and give brief details of ongoing work and plans. Each team will only write something when they have something to say.

General

Keep eyes on PyCon USA, where pyscript.com is officially launched this week. For Europeans, we are also at PyCon DE/PyData Berlin, which has already started.

Numba Team (JIT-compiling python code to make it fast)

Numba 0.57.0rc1 and llvmlite0.40.0rc1 are released. The new Numba and llvmlite releases add support for Python 3.11, NumPy 1.24, and upgrades to LLVM 14. After this release, we will be dedicating more time in developing a new compiler pipeline. More details can be found at https://numba.discourse.group/t/proposal-numba-2023-mvp/1792.

Distdatacats Team (remote bytes, file formats, catalogs and data processing)

  • The Intake project has a new driver leveraging DuckDB: intake-duckdb
  • fsspec and friends release 2023.4.0 with greatly increased documentation and coverage around expectations for bulk file operations
  • rfsspec, the experimental Rust reimplementation of some async backends for fsspec is now on PyPI as 0.1.0: https://pypi.org/project/rfsspec/ . We will be using this for benchmarking IO-heavy workloads on dask clusters.
  • the kerchunk project is trying to merge references sets directly to parquet output, hoping to complete datasets with radically smaller memory footprint
  • awkward-array 2023.4.1 is out, and we have been working hard to improve our optimization code to deal with the extreme requirements of High-Energy Physics analysis, which has so many more operations and input files than any other data processing pipeline we've come across before.

Jupyter Team (in-browser IDE for python and others)

The Jupyter Team has been working on patching JupyterLab extensions in preparation for the upcoming JupyterLab 4 release. We have also been working on pull requests for a few Jupyter Notebook 6 extensions that were adversely affected by an update of Marked.js in the notebook code to deal with a reported CVE. The team is preparing for the upcoming JupyterCon in Paris, where we will be co-presenting a talk on the past, present and future of the Jupyter Notebook.

BeeWare Team (deploy python projects to mobile and elsewhere)

PyCon US 2023 is rapidly approaching, and BeeWare will be there! There's 2 BeeWare-related talks on the schedule, and we'll have a booth in the Community section of the main floor. If you're going to be there, stop by - and if you're a fan of the project and want to help us staff the booth - get in touch.

Toga 0.3.1 has been released. This fixes a number of layout issues, and completes the documentation and implementation of 9 widgets (Widget, Button, Label, ActivityIndicator, Box, Divider, ProgressBar, Switch and Slider). It also introduces the use of Shoelace as a web component toolkit for the web backend.

Briefcase 0.3.14 has been released. This is another big Briefcase release, adding code signing for Windows, system packaging for Arch, ManyLinux-based AppImage builds, faster Flatpak builds, and support for PyGame.

Rubicon ObjC 0.4.6 has been released. This is a minor bugfix release, mostly to address silencing a warning that was being raised when Rubicon was installed with recent versions of Setuptools.

Anaconda