On December 19, the Python Software Foundation’s board voted to present Stefan Krah with a Community Service Award for the fourth quarter of 2012.
Stefan has been a CPython committer since April 2010 when his work on a C version of the decimal module was tracked in a Subversion branch tied to issue #7652, though his work began far before that. Stefah created the mpdecimal C library, an implementation of the General Decimal Arithmetic Specification, as a multi-platform project providing “correctly-rounded arbitrary precision decimal floating point arithmetic.” The cdecimal module utilizes mpdecimal to provide a much more performant decimal library for Python.
The code was checked in early this year in changeset 7355550d5357, in time for the release of CPython 3.3. As the What’s New in Python 3.3 document shows, cdecimal has proven to be significantly faster with speedups as high as 120x on a pi calculation benchmark. The mpdecimal quickstart page shows how to execute the code yourself, and even the telecom and database tests show speedups of 30x and 12x, respectively.
Stefan has also contributed to several other areas of the codebase, including work on PEP 3118 for Python 3.3. He also contributes changes to platforms such as HP-UX and AIX.
The Python Software Foundation and Python community thanks Stefan for his consistent efforts and excellent contributions!
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