issue_comments: 1422882836

(I was already typing this when Ryan posted so I'll finish anyway :sweat_smile:)

To clarify, what @jhamman is suggesting in this specific issue is xarray wrapping aesara, as opposed to aesara wrapping xarray.

Both of these goals would be great, but in xarray we would particularly love to be able to wrap aesara because: - We already have a large community of users who use xarray objects as their top-level interface, - It continues a larger project of xarray being generalized to wrap any numpy-like "duck array". - Our ultimate goal is for xarray users to be able to seamless switch out their computing backend and find which library gives them the best performance without changing the rest of their high-level code.

For xarray to wrap aesara aesara needs to provide a numpy-like API, ideally conforming to the python array api standard. If aesara already does this then we should try out the wrapping right now!

If you're interested in this topic I invite you to drop in to a meeting of the Pangeo working group on distributed arrays! We have so far had talks from distributed computing libraries including Arkouda, Ramba, and cubed, all of which we are hoping to support as compute backends.

If anyone is also separately interested in using xarray inside PyTensor / aesara then that's awesome, but we should try to track efforts in that direction on a different issue to keep this distinction clear. We plan to better support that direction of wrapping soon by fully exposing our (semi-private internal currently) lightweight Variable class.