Numba 0.50.0 -- Burndown

[Valentin Haenel]

Dear Numba Community,

Today marks the beginning of the 0.50.0 burndown period! Some of the
core developers met yesterday and filtered the pull-requests in the
Github milestone for this release:

https://github.com/numba/numba/pulls?page=1&q=is%3Aopen+is%3Apr+milestone%3A%22Numba+0.50+RC%22

For this release we would like to try something new: kindly ask for some
help from the larger Numba community (yes, that means you!) when

reviewing the pull-request!

So... If you happen to have the bandwidth and inclination, please don't
hesitate to skim the milestone for PRs that you may be able to review
and grab them! The current target date for the 0.50.0RC1 is Thursday
29th May 2020. If you are interested in contributing to Numba this would
be a great way to start helping out!


Here are some project specific strategies and ideas for reviewing:

a) Check if the code and documentation is sane.
b) Check that the general Python coding conventions have been adhered to.
c) Does the PR include tests? How well do they cover the implementation
/ change?  (Since we can't quite run coverage over compiled functions,
you'll have to eyeball this requirement as best you can).

Once the above has been checked, try to break the submission
deliberately to find any last bugs or issues.

For any pull-requests that implement NumPy functions, the following
approach might be helpful:

a) Check that NumPy hasn't deprecated the function yet.
b) Check that the Numba implementation behaves like the NumPy
implementation.  (A common technique is to compare implementations by running
them on the same input and ensuring that the outputs match.)
c) Check b, but also for None, NaN, True, False etc...

With best wishes,

V-