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points by bheztio 2 days ago | 0 comments

Last I tried numba, admittedly a long time ago, it was a pain due to extensive system requirements or alternatively requiring use of conda, which I dislike (for many reasons, but it's besides the point - I want to use standard python tools). Did they start to bundle their dependencies or..?

[–] ajross 2 days ago

PyPI integration is clean; "pip install numba" does what you expect, uv works fine, yada yada.

The one aesthetic gripe I have is that the LLVM included is a fork. It won't even try to work with the system LLVM and insists on installing a huge wheel with custom binaries. But on a modern system an extra LLVM is noise, so I guess I don't care that much.

[–] pitrou 1 day ago

> The one aesthetic gripe I have is that the LLVM included is a fork.

It's not technically a fork, it's a standalone build of vanilla LLVM (ok, there are a couple patches: https://github.com/numba/llvmlite/tree/main/conda-recipes).

> It won't even try to work with the system LLVM and insists on installing a huge wheel with custom binaries.

Not only does LLVM not have a stable ABI, it doesn't even have a stable API. It's difficult to write code that works reliably against a non-trivial number of LLVM major versions.

For the record, here is the LLVM compatibility table for llvmlite versions (llvmlite is the Python-C++ shim that Numba uses to talk to LLVM): https://llvmlite.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#llvm-compatibilit...

If you want a Numba linked against your system LLVM, the solution would be for your distribution to provide a system package for Numba (and llvmlite).

[–] zahlman 1 day ago

I don't understand why your comment was dead; I've vouched for it.