New developments in Jupyter VPython

[Bruce Sherwood]

As you probably know, Jupyter is a powerful programming environment that is increasingly popular with computational scientists. The VPython module for this environment is referred to as Jupyter VPython, and its syntax is that of GlowScript VPython.

Many thanks to Matt Craig for creating a new, powerful mechanism for building installers for Jupyter VPython on Windows, Mac, and Linux. 

The new version 1.0.2 has significantly faster vector operations thanks to work by Ruth Chabay and me to "cythonize" the vector machinery. The new version starts with "1" in recognition of the fact that, with faster vectors, Jupyter VPython is now comparable in speed to Classic VPython, though it doesn't yet have 3D text (recently implemented in GlowScript VPython and a candidate to be made available in Jupyter VPython soon), full extrusion capabilities (not yet available in GlowScript), and frame (also not available in GlowScript).

 

See vpython.org for instructions on how to install and use Jupyter VPython.

[Joe Heafner]

Bruce, 

Does this new installation method supersede that in the Anaconda distribution that uses pip from the commandline?

Joe Heafner
Sent from one of my Macs

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[Bruce Sherwood]

A simple terminal statement is as usual "pip install vpython --upgrade". See vpython.org for other possible terminal statements that you can use with Anaconda.

What's special about Matt's installers is that they are generated nearly automatically from the GitHub repository, and they deal with the problem of generating the compiled vector module. Cython is a tool that takes a mildly decorated Python module and generates a C-language version, which is then compiled. The compilation process requires special care for Windows, because most Windows machines do not have their own C compiler installed, so Matt's procedure includes in the installer the appropriate compiled module, for all platforms including Windows.