These are some of the discussion topics around how new linear algebra data structures will be defined in QuTiP as part of my Google Summer of Code project.

After some discussion, including some further designs of how the new dispatcher methods would function, we are trying to pursue a “light” data structure strategy. This will hopefully have very lightweight instances of the data, and dispatch methods are simplified; mulitple dispatch is a difficult concept to fit into a true object-oriented style, and we believe that dispatcher methods will make adding new data types and dispatched functions significantly easier.

Originally written on the 8th of June, 2020.

This is an early design document about the separation of data layer in QuTiP as part of my Google Summer of Code project. This is a very early-stage document, which is significantly liable to change, but is indicative of the direction we were planning to go.

Originally written on the 1st of June, 2020.

Star (or wildcard) imports are one of the methods for importing libraries in Python, and although they are generally discouraged, they are rather prevalent in a lot of notebook-style scientific code. Within a package being imported, there is no official way of knowing whether this is by a star import, but since Python allows overriding just about everything, we can detect slight differences in the methods and inject arbitrary code if the wildcard is used.

In QuTiP, we currently suffer from long import times and want to move to a scipy-like style where fewer symbols are in the global package namespace, and submodules are only imported if explicitly requested. We want to issue a warning to people currently using the from qutip import * syntax, because the number of symbols available to them will soon decrease.