This is well-written. I could follow along quite nicely, from the setup through the bottlenecks and onto the resolution of the performance bug. Even the PRs are very pleasant to read: the majority of them is just a handful of changed lines with an added tests and a bit of documentation.
I was taken aback for a moment that this work originated from a report on StackOverflow. I had thought SO was effectively dead and abandoned by its community. But maybe I shouldn't project my own experience onto everyone else.
I’m not sure why it took me, a NumPy developer, looking at the benchmark numbers and saying “hmm, this is a bug”. But that is what it took. People are sometimes slow to treat behavior in dependencies like NumPy as bugs.
or maybe SO is back to its community sans clout chasers and tourists? If a vaninishing minority drive a given community in content generation and discourse, then lurkers etc leaving isnt as meaningful. you could lose 99% of users on many platforms without disrupting the core community and often having the added benefit of imoroving SNR.
It's a less marketable product in the modern attention economy, but that isnt the same as a dead community. It would be interesting to see a plot of posts/discussion liveliness per unit time and seeing is quality and depth of both questions and answers has changed and how they have changed.
I was taken aback for a moment that this work originated from a report on StackOverflow. I had thought SO was effectively dead and abandoned by its community. But maybe I shouldn't project my own experience onto everyone else.