Hi. This is Francesc Alted, one of the original creators of the numexpr package (with David Cooke) back in late 2000s.
I have been acting as a developer and maintainer of the project since then (with the exception of the years 2017 → 2023, where Robert McLeod took the maintainer hut, providing a great service).
In all these years, maintainers have not received any donation with the exception of a NumFOCUS Small Development Grant ($5000 USD, IIRC) that we asked in 2017 for funding NumExpr 3.0 development (that Robert brilliantly executed, but that was not enough to get it out of beta stage).
Fast forward to 2026, and almost 20 years after the initial version, the numexpr project has not received any single donation besides the NumFOCUS grant above. Right now, numexpr is a broadly used package, with ~2500 stars in GitHub. However, the advent of AI is making its maintenance a heavier burden than ever (with 12 PR open at this time and counting), and unfortunately it seems like everybody is expecting it to be ‘magically’ maintained.
We, the open source users should understand that, if we want maintainers to continue doing its job, we must end this free lunch. If people/institutions/corporations really want things moving forward, I am asking that you fund me instead of expecting me to continue working for free. Please make a donation via GitHub, NumFOCUS, or contract me via my company, ironArray SLU.
Besides maintenance, I am open to new developments to make numexpr better or/and faster. If you want professional services from me, other than pure maintenance, let’s have a chat.
Thanks for your understanding.
Francesc Alted
Current numexpr maintainer