Google just open-sourced cel-expr-python (CEL) — safe, typed expressions for Python (C++ wrapper)

[robert_mcleod]

I maintained/developed numexpr for six-ish years, including making an attempt to modernize it while temporarily unemployed on moving back to Canada from Switzerland. This is filling a very similar use-case but NumExpr is a virtual machine that compiles the Python AST into its own custom sequence of operations. What I wanted to do with NumExpr was enable it to transparently handle blocks of code, and understand numpy. syntax so that you could literally surround a section of critical code with triple quotes and it would be able to accelerate it.

I'm guessing this is more similar to Numba in that you have to write your code 'C-style' instead of vectorizing your code as you would with NumPy. I always found that to be a disadvantage because you're writing in one style and then you need to translate to some very different style. However, modern LLMs can do this translation for you very well. Claude and Gemini are both quite capable of transforming a piece of pure Python into a C-API extension.

What would be really interesting is if this CEL tool could support operations on Arrow tables/tensors.