pyFFTW is a pythonic wrapper around FFTW , a very popular Fast Fourier Transform library.
pyFFTW is used for several applications and in particular in packages of the Fluiddyn project. For example, pyFFTW is used by Fluidsim for the pseudo-spectral algorithm and by Fluidimage to compute image correlation.
Unfortunately, these last months, not enough work was put in pyFFTW and it started to lead to issues. Some broken conda packages were available. Python 3.12 was not supported 9 months after its release. There was no wheel for MacOS ARM. Moreover, pyFFTW was incompatible with Cython 3 and Numpy 2.0. Finally, the CI on Github Actions was broken so it became even impossible to improve pyFFTW code.
I waited for a long time seeing this situation but nobody was available to fix these issues. Finally, I decided to invest some time to fix pyFFTW. After few pull requests , I think the situation is now much better. pyFFTW 0.14.0 was released in July 2024 with good compatibility with recent software and hardware.
Due to this work and to the need of a new maintainer for pyFFTW, I became officially one of the maintainer of this project.
I need to mention that this new responsability is twofold. On the one hand, it is nice to be able to help the community and it represents a recognition of helpful and useful work spent on the project. On the other hand, this is a real long term responsability which won’t be rewarded by anyone and in particular by my employer, the CNRS.
Of course, this is not particular to me or this project pyFFTW. The open-source ecosystems depend on several projects maintained by volonters. This is a global political issue. Open-source ecosystems are used by companies and public institutions. They are in some ways useful for humanity. We should invent robust mechanisms to support important open-source projects and their maintainers.