Maybe: Numpy support

[facelessuser]

I've gone back and forth on this. ColorAide currently doesn't require any dependencies as it is all implemented in pure Python. With that said, it suffers from the performance downside of being pure Python. For many, pure Python is likely more than sufficient, but there may be use cases that would really like better performance.

It would be nice if there was a compatibility layer to allow for speed increase. The problem is that while we can vectorized everything so that abstraction is easier, general vectorization is slower in pure Python than sometimes directly iterating and apply calculations. In Numpy, vectorization is the way to go for optimal speed.

Currently, I use ColorAide in some places where not using Numpy is actually helpful. It is possible we could have two versions, but that also doubles the maintenance burden.

I think abstraction would be difficult as we would sacrifice more performance to gain performance when Numpy is available. I think supporting two variants is probably too much maintenance.

If we were to do this, we would probably just switch over to Numpy in some major release. This would be a huge change. This would require gutting our current matrix support in algebra and making ColorAide use Numpy everywhere, vectorizing as much as possible so that we get the performance boosts. This would require us to prototype it and benchmark it.

Anyways, I don't know if/when this would happen, but I figure we can keep this open as a possibility. I have heartedly looked into this before, but the only way is to go all in, if we do this.

[dofuuz]

NumPy is de facto standard in Python, so I think it's better to use it if there are any advantages.

What I want for ColorAide is N-dimensional array(ndarray) processing. So it can deal with images, not only the single color.
Introducing NumPy can solve that kind of things.

[facelessuser]

That's an interesting thought. If we were to do something like N-dimensional colors, that would be a huge rework, or maybe it would be a reimagined ColorAide from the ground up. It's something to think about, but it would be a lot of work.