python

The cibuildwheel package has just had a major release with some fantastic features. Python 2.7 and 3.5 support has been removed (and PyPy3.6), allowing us to update to the latest manylinux and auditwheel versions, and support the newly unified manylinux PyPy3.7 images. We now allow users to select pypa/build as a build frontend. We now have a custom option to enable pre-release Pythons (3.10 currently) for testing before they are ABI stable (please don’t release wheels until that happens). Maybe most exciting, cibuildwheel now supports configuration in pyproject.toml, allowing you to be even further isolated from dependence on your CI system; you can easily produce Linux and Windows wheels locally (macOS still installs to system locations). And, since my last post and introduction post, cibuildwheel is now part of the PyPA!

cibuildwheel has just had two back-to-back releases, two weeks apart, representing several months of hard work and some exciting few features! I will be covering both releases at once, so we will discuss Apple Silicon support, architecture emulation on Linux, integrated PEP 621 Requires-Python support, the native GitHub Action, extended build and test controls, and more!

If you are following the releases, 1.7.0 came out last November (2020), and included the fantastic output folding feature, which makes logs much easier to read on CI systems that support folding, and makes it much easier to see how long each step takes. The 1.7.x series also included the addition of the working examples section of the documentation, which tracks some known projects using cibuildwheel, such as scikit-learn, Matlotlib, and MyPy; it is a great place to go to look into how other projects have integrated cibuildwheel into their workflow.

I have an general overview post as well. Now let’s look at what’s new! Update: cibuildwheel is now an official package of the PyPA!

This is the first of two posts on cibuildwheel, a fantastic project I joined after switching to it from my own azure-wheel-helpers, which I’ve blogged about here before. It is the best wheelbuilding system available for Python today, and can make something that is normally a pain to setup and a headache to maintain a breeze (by forcing all the headaches on us, of course, as maintainers, but it’s better to solve issues centrally! Obviously we rather like solving these problems. Or we are just crazy, which is also possible ;) ).

Be sure to checkout the followup post over new features in 1.8.0 and 1.9.0, too! Also, cibuildwheel was recently accepted into the PyPA!

I am pleased to announce the release of pybind11 2.6.0! This is the largest release since 2.2 (released over three years ago). I would like to highlight some of the key changes below; be sure to check out the changelog and upgrade guide for more information! The focus of this release was stability, packaging, and supporting more platforms, though there are a lot of small features and useful additions, covered by newly expanded docs.

COVID-19 is ravaging the globe. Let’s look at the excellent Johns Hopkins dataset using Pandas. This will serve both as a guideline for getting the data and exploring on your own, as well as an example of Pandas multi-indexing in an easy to understand situation. I am currently involved in science-responds.

The foundational histogramming package for Python, boost-histogram, hit beta status with version 0.6! This is a major update to the new Boost.Histogram bindings. Since I have not written about boost-histogram yet here, I will introduce the library in its current state. Version 0.6.2 was based on the recently released Boost C++ Libraries 1.72 Histogram package. Feel free to visit the docs, or keep reading this post.

This Python library is part of a larger picture in the Scikit-HEP ecosystem of tools for Particle Physics and is funded by DIANA/HEP and IRIS-HEP. It is the core library for making and manipulating histograms. Other packages are under development to provide a complete set of tools to work with and visualize histograms. The Aghast package is designed to convert between popular histogram formats, and the Hist package will be designed to make common analysis tasks simple, like plotting via tools such as the mplhep package. Hist and Aghast will be initially driven by HEP (High Energy Physics and Particle Physics) needs, but outside issues and contributions are welcome and encouraged.