[geos-devel] New Python bindings / RFC proposal for Shapely 2.0

[Joris Van den Bossche]

Hi all,

This email is not directly related to GEOS development itself, so excuse my
interruption here. But it is about Python bindings to GEOS, so I assumed
this would be of interest to some of the people following this list. And if
not, you can skip the rest of the message ;)

Background: we have been working on a new set of Python bindings to GEOS in
the PyGEOS package (https://github.com/pygeos/pygeos/). The initial focus
was to make it easier and more performant to work with arrays of geometries
(where Shapely is now focused on scalar geometries). In its core, PyGEOS
provides two things: a Python extension type coded in C that wraps a GEOS
geometry pointer in a PyObject (which gives us memory management from the
Python side), and a set of vectorized functions exposing GEOS' spatial
operations making use of numpy's ufunc API ("universal function",
element-wise array functions with broadcasting). See
https://caspervdw.github.io/Introducing-Pygeos/ for some more details.

While this separate package made it easier to experiment (and which we are
still doing), on the long term, it's not ideal to have two incompatible
GEOS wrappers in the Python ecosystem. 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, feedback from Shapely
users would be very much appreciated!
(feedback on the details how we are wrapping GEOS in PyGEOS is of course
also welcome)

Best,
Joris
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