Extracting Nox

[nestordemeure]

Hi!

First, great work! I have done a lot of numerical computing (in non-space-related domains) and you have built some things I have been wishing for several times in the past few years! Thank you so much for sharing your work with the community.

On that topic, is there a plan to extract your XLA bindings and Nox into their own repository (to make targeted contributions / issues easier) and crates¹ (so that others can start using them for non-Elodin related projects)?

Footnotes

1. I guess the XLA bindings might have a shot at being merged back into Laurent Mazare's crate if he is open to contributions. ↩

[sphw]

Super glad you like Nox. I agree that it fills a niche not covered by the other Rust linear algebra libraries.

We are likely not going to move the crates out of this mono-repo, we find it easier to work with the mono-repo approach for a bunch of reasons. What we will do though is publish our crates to crates.io. I don't envision huge changes to Nox going forward, but API stability is not guaranteed. We also have a good way to go in increasing our test coverage to make sure things like batching operations are 100% correct. We are happy for others to start contributing directly to this repo. We'd love for others to add things like automatic differentiation that we have less of a need for internally but are super useful for many use-cases.

I'm happy to talk to LaurentMazare about upstreaming our changes. IMO it's not so much a case of better or worse here, but different. The upstream xla-rs crate uses a shared library while we statically link. I believe that is a better choice, but a solid argument could be made either way.