RFC: Roadmap for Shapely 2.0

[Joris Van den Bossche]

Hi all,

In GeoPandas, we have been working on improving performance over the last years. First with some experiments in cython, but the effort is now concentrated in the PyGEOS package, new python bindings to GEOS that makes it easier and more performant to work with arrays of geometries (https://github.com/pygeos/pygeos/). This can give a considerable performance boost for GeoPandas. And for people wanting to try this out: in the development version of GeoPandas, this can already optionally be used when PyGEOS is installed (see https://geopandas.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install.html#using-the-optional-pygeos-dependency).

However, having two packages with Python bindings to GEOS is not ideal (certainly not for GeoPandas, since our users expect Shapely geometries as the scalar values you get from GeoDataFrame/GeoSeries operations).

Therefore, there is now a proposal to upstream the work being done in PyGEOS to Shapely, along with some API changes in Shapely: "RFC 1: Roadmap for Shapely 2.0" (https://github.com/shapely/shapely-rfc/pull/1).

Given that this are some profound changes to Shapely (which therefore also impact all GeoPandas users), feedback from users would be very much appreciated!

Best,

Joris