[Yt-dev] Fwd: [Cython] ANN: Cython 0.14 released

[Matthew Turk]

Cython is now part of the install script, but I won't be upgrading
that installed Cython to 0.14 immediately.  These features will mostly
not help out yt's usage of Cython.

I think we should also consider requiring Cython during
installation/setup, so that we can stop checking in humongous .c
files.


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Robert Bradshaw <robertwb at math.washington.edu>
Date: Tue, Dec 14, 2010 at 1:40 PM
Subject: [Cython] ANN: Cython 0.14 released
To: python-announce-list at python.org, cython-users at googlegroups.com,
cython-dev at codespeak.net


The Cython project is happy to announce the release of Cython 0.14.

This release fixes several bugs in the previous 0.13 release, improved
debugging and build support, and heavily improves Python compatibility
in terms of supported features. It can be downloaded from
http://cython.org/ or http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Cython/0.14

Release notes: http://wiki.cython.org/ReleaseNotes-0.14


== New Features ==

 * Python classes can now be nested and receive a proper closure at
definition time.

 * Redefinition is supported for Python functions, even within the same scope.

 * Lambda expressions are supported in class bodies and at the module level.

 * Metaclasses are supported for Python classes, both in Python 2 and
Python 3 syntax. The Python 3 syntax (using a keyword argument in the
type declaration) is preferred and optimised at compile time.

 * "final" extension classes prevent inheritance in Python space. This
feature is available through the new "cython.final" decorator. In the
future, these classes may receive further optimisations.

 * "internal" extension classes do not show up in the module
dictionary. This feature is available through the new
"cython.internal" decorator.

 * Extension type inheritance from builtin types, such as "cdef class
MyUnicode(unicode)", now works without further external type
redeclarations (which are also strongly discouraged now and continue
to issue a warning).

 * GDB support. http://docs.cython.org/src/userguide/debugging.html

 * A new build system with support for inline distutils directives,
correct dependency tracking, and parallel compilation.
http://wiki.cython.org/enhancements/distutils_preprocessing

 * Support for dynamic compilation at runtime via the new
cython.inline function and cython.compile decorator.
http://wiki.cython.org/enhancements/inline



== General improvements and bug fixes ==

 * In parallel assignments, the right side was evaluated in reverse
order in 0.13. This could result in errors if it had side effects
(e.g. function calls).

 * In some cases, methods of builtin types would raise a SystemError
instead of an AttributeError when called on None.

 * Constant tuples are now cached over the lifetime of an extension
module, just like CPython does. Constant argument tuples of Python
function calls are also cached.

 * Closures have tightened to include exactly the names used in the
inner functions and classes. Previously, they held the complete locals
of the defining function.

 * "nogil" blocks are supported when compiling pure Python code by
writing "with cython.nogil".

 * The builtin "next()" function in Python 2.6 and later is now
implemented internally and therefore available in all Python versions.
This makes it the preferred and portable way of manually advancing an
iterator.

 * In addition to the previously supported inlined generator
expressions in 0.13, "sorted(genexpr)" can now be used as well. Typing
issues were fixed in "sum(genexpr)" that could lead to invalid C code
being generated. Other known issues with inlined generator expressions
were also fixed that make upgrading to 0.14 a strong recommendation
for code that uses them. Note that general generators and generator
expressions continue to be not supported.

 * Iterating over arbitrary pointer types is now supported, as is an
optimized version of the in operator, e.g. x in ptr[a:b].

 * Inplace arithmetic operators now respect the cdivision directive
and are supported for complex types.



== Incompatible changes ==

 * Typing a variable as type "complex" previously gave it the Python
object type. It now uses the appropriate C/C++ {{{double complex}}}
type. A side-effect is that assignments and typed function parameters
now accept anything that Python can coerce to a complex, including
integers and floats, and not only complex instances.

 * Large integer literals pass through the compiler in a safer way. To
prevent truncation in C code, non 32-bit literals are turned into
Python objects if not used in a C context. This context can either be
given by a clear C literal suffix such as "UL" or "LL" (or "L" in
Python 3 code), or it can be an assignment to a typed variable or a
typed function argument, in which case it is up to the user to take
care of a sufficiently large value space of the target.

 * Python functions are declared in the order they appear in the file,
rather than all being created at module creation time. This is
consistent with Python and needed to support, for example, conditional
or repeated declarations of functions. In the face of circular imports
this may cause code to break, so a new
{{{--disable-function-redefinition}}} flag was added to revert to the
old behavior. This flag will be removed in a future release, so should
only be used as a stopgap until old code can be fixed.



== Contributors ==

Many people contributed to this release, including:

 * Haoyu Bai
 * Stefan Behnel
 * Robert Bradshaw
 * Ondrej Certik
 * Lisandro Dalcin
 * Mark Florisson
 * Eric Huss
 * Vitja Makarov
 * Corbin Simpson
 * Kurt Smith
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