VTK-8.1.0 wheels for all platforms on pypi!

I cannot believe it has been 6 years since my last blog post!  Anyway, I have some good news to announce here.

In the Python community, VTK has always been somewhat difficult to install (in comparison to pure Python packages). One has required to either use a specific package management tool or resort to source builds. This has been a major problem when trying to install tools that rely on VTK, like Mayavi.

During the SciPy 2017 conference held at Austin last year, a few of the Kitware developers, notably Jean-Christophe Fillion-Robin  (JC for short) and some of the VTK developers got together with some of us from the SciPy community and decided to try and put together wheels for VTK.

JC did the hard work of figuring this out and setting up a nice VTKPythonPackage during the sprints to make this process easy. As of last week (Jan 27, 2018) Mac OS X wheels were not supported. Last weekend, I finally got the time (thanks to Enthought) to play with JC's work. I figured out how to get the wheels working on OS X. With this, in principle, we could build VTK wheels on all the major platforms.

We decided to try and push wheels at least for the major VTK releases. This in itself would be a massive improvement in making VTK easier to install. Over the last few days, I have built wheels on Linux, OS X, and Windows. All of these are 64 bit wheels for VTK-8.1.0.

Now, VTK 8.x adds a c++11 dependency, and so we cannot build these versions of VTK for Python 2.7 on Windows.

So now we have 64 bit wheels on Windows for Python versions 3.5.x and 3.6.x.
Unfortunately, 3.4.x required a different Visual Studio installed and I lost patience setting things up on my Windows VM.

On Linux, we have 64 bit wheels for Python 2.7.x, 3.4.x, 3.5.x, and 3.6.x.

On MacOS, we have 64 bit wheels for Python 2.7.x, 3.4.x, 3.5.x, and 3.6.x.

So if you are using a 64 bit Python, you can now do

   $ pip install vtk

and have VTK-8.1.0 installed!

This is really nice to have and should hopefully make VTK and other tools a lot easier to install.

A big thank you to JC, the other Kitware developers, the VTK Python developers, especially David Gobbi who has worked on the VTK Python wrappers for many many years now,  for making this happen. Apologies if I missed anyone but thank you all!

Enjoy!

Enthought ... now in India

Enthought, as most of you (following my blog anyway) know,

is a leading scientific computing solutions provider and an extra-ordinary

champion of scientific computing with Python. Enthought is headquartered

at Austin, Texas and has offices in New York, Cambridge (UK) and Brussels.

Enthought has started a new development office in Mumbai, India. Starting July 2010,

I am taking two years of long leave (lien) from IITB to serve as the

Managing Director of Enthought India. We have a nice office located at the Supreme

business park in Hiranandani, Powai.

We right now have three people (including yours truly) and are looking

for more people. We aim to build a strong development team. We are

currently working on an exciting new product that we will release over

the course of next year. Stay tuned!

If you are a strong Python developer with a penchant for challenging

problems and building scientific computing applications, do send us your

resume.

I can be reached on my usual email addresses and my Enthought email is

prabhu at enthought dot com. Possibly the best place to send in resumes is:

india-jobs@enthought.com