Third-party kernels page

General
1

The primary list of available third-party kernels appears to be the Github wiki page https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/wiki/Jupyter-kernels (referenced, for instance, in the recent “99 ways to extend…” blog post).

It’s a bit of a mess. The list has become very long, and contains a fair number of projects that are dead, or aren’t actually kernels (magics, etc). The columns are also not particularly useful: the Jupyter/IPython version doesn’t seem useful except for determining what is deeply obsolete, for instance.

I had a quick go at filtering the list to at least remove dead projects here: https://gist.github.com/chronitis/682c4e0d9f663e85e3d87e97cd7d1624 , removing most of the columns and adding a one-line install where it appeared obvious in the documentation.

However, looking at it, I think it still leaves too long and unhelpful a list, which might suggest the github wiki format has reached a limit.

Some other dimensions I can imagine being interesting, to let people more quickly filter and discover interesting implementations:

  • Native vs wrapper
  • Proprietary vs free target language
  • Topic (general purpose, big data, shell, computer algebra…)
  • Docker image name, where available
  • Last updated/latest release

Does anyone have any ideas for how it might be better presented and/or curated in future?

2

I wonder if there’s a Javascript framework for quick, sortable tables? Then we could just keep data about kernels as a CSV file or something like this and render it as a table that can be sorted by different columns.

Another thought - I think this list will, in general, become outdated if we don’t have someone who is regularly keeping an eye on it.

Either way, I’m a fan of updating this list to reflect the actual status of many no-longer-maintained kernels