On a related note, has anyone tried out nanobind? It's probably a bit too new for us, but curious if anyone had any opinions on it.

On a related note, has anyone tried out nanobind? It's probably a bit too new for us, but curious if anyone had any opinions on it.

I just today migrated a (small) research project to nanobin v1.0.0.

As this project is array heavy nanobin is super nice for this as it allows you to just use the nb::ndarray API and avoid all the buffer stuff in pybind11 (which honestly isn't that bad, but if you don't have to do it yourself that's great).

Other advantages that are nice about nanobind (YMMV though project to project):

More concretely, benchmarks show ~2-3× faster compile time, ~3× smaller binaries, and up to ~8× lower runtime overheads compared to pybind11.

• https://nanobind.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

nanobind can exchange n-dimensional arrays (henceforth “ndarrays”) with popular array programming frameworks including NumPy, PyTorch, TensorFlow, and JAX. It supports zero-copy exchange using two protocols:

• The classic buffer protocol.
• DLPack, a GPU-compatible generalization of the buffer protocol.

nanobind knows how to talk to each framework and takes care of all the nitty-gritty details.

• https://nanobind.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ndarray.html

My first impressions are that it is great!

* [ ]  `macosx` (developer needs access to macOS)

I'm not sure about this one, as it doesn't use NumPy, and is written in Objective C, not C or C++.

• macosx (developer needs access to macOS)

I'm not sure about this one, as it doesn't use NumPy, and is written in Objective C, not C or C++.

I agree pybind doesn't seem like the right fit. I have wondered if it'd be worthwhile to transition to use pyobjc at all so we could write the extension in Python code... https://pyobjc.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Of course, that would mean an extra dependency on macos and needing to learn how to write that style of Python.

The last PR #28785 does ft2font. After that there will be some clean up to remove the NumPy wrappers.

The last two PRs: #28856 takes care of porting remaining common functionality to pybind11, and #28857 removes NumPy and the helpers.