issue_comments: 1102925385

Hi @miniufo et al., just my two cents:

This is simpler and do not make heavy dependence of the third-party package like xgcm.

That is a fair point, but I think there is a counterpoint to be made, that xgcm gives you some more functionality (especially with the new grid_ufuncs feature) with regard to array padding. As you note, this is not needed for your particular setup, but if you use xgcm, you would get the same functionality + at a later point you might get padding on complex grid topologies for free down the line. So in the end this seems like a tradeoff between adding more dependencies vs flexibility and generalizability in the future.

I'll give a try with differentiate() and pad() to implement grad/div/vor... But some designs in xgcm also inspire me to make things much natural.

This makes me think that you really want xgcm, because these properties will naturally be located on staggered grid positions, even if your data is originally on a A grid. And once you start to try to handle these cases it would appear to me that you duplicate some of the functionality of xgcm?

I am still worried about the metrics concept introduced by xgcm. I think this should be discussed over xgcm's repo.

I second others here and think it would be great to elaborate on this on the xgcm issue tracker. But I also want to point out, that using the metrics functionality is entirely optional in xgcm, so if you desire, you can roll your own logic on top of grid.diff/interp etc.