Status update week 4 GSoC

Continued work on tutorial material

During the past week I got binder to work with our tutorial material. Using environment.yml did require that we had a conda package available. So I set up our instance of Drone IO to push to the sympy conda channel. The new base dockerimage used in the beta version of binder (v2) does not contain gcc by default. This prompted me to add gcc to our environment.yml, unfortunately this breaks the build process:

Attempting to roll back.
LinkError: post-link script failed for package defaults::gcc-4.8.5-7
running your command again with `-v` will provide additional information
location of failed script: /opt/conda/bin/.gcc-post-link.sh
==> script messages <==
<None>

I've reached out on their gitter channel, we'll see if anyone knows what's up. If we cannot work around this we will have two options:

  1. Accept that the binder version cannot compile any generated code
  2. Try to use binder with a Dockerimage based on the one used for CI tests (with the difference that it will include a prebuilt conda environment from environment.yml)

I hope that the second approach should work unless we hit a image size limitation (and perhaps we need a special base image, I haven't looked into those details yet).

Jason has been producing some really high quality tutorial notebooks and left lots of constructive feedback on my initial work. Based on his feedback I've started reworking the code-generation examples not to use classes as extensively. I've also added some introductory notebooks: numerical integration of ODEs in general & intro to SymPy's cryptically named lambdify (the latter notebook is still to be merged into master).

Work on SymPy for version 1.1

After last weeks mentor meeting we decided that we would try to revert a change to sympy.cse (a function which performs common subexpression elimination). I did spend some time profiling the new implementation. However, I was not able to find any obvious bottle-necks, and given that it is not the main scope of my project I did not pursue this any further at the moment.

I also just started looking at introducing a Python code printer. There is a PythonPrinter in SymPy right now, although it assumes that SymPy is available. The plan right now is to rename to old printer to SymPyCodePrinter and have the new printer primarily print expressions, which is what the CodePrinter class does best, even though it can be "coerced" into emitting statements.

Plans for the upcoming week

As the conference approaches the work intensifies both with respect to finishing up the tutorial material and fixing blocking issues for a SymPy 1.1 release. Working on the tutorial material helps finding things to improve code-generation wise (just today I opened a minor issue just to realize that my "work-in-progress" pull-request from an earlier week (which I intend to get back working on next week too) actually fixes said issue.

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