Swapping out objective function with open-source equivalent

[sgbaird]

https://github.com/VasiliBaranov/packing-generation

https://github.com/VasiliBaranov/packing-generation/issues/15#issuecomment-558380097

[sgbaird]

@MrJasonBear I'd like to swap out the NGIS executable with the open-source implementation in the packing-generation repo. Then I'd like to have simulations for ~10k points, each repeated ten times (total 100k simulations). I'm planning on 100 particles per simulation to make the computations faster. To do this, it would help a lot if the open-source implementation was available on PyPI (i.e. pip-installable). This makes it so:

• Running on a high-performance computing platform (in our case, CHPC) becomes trivial via e.g. submitit
• Others can reproduce or extend the results more easily
• It makes it easier for us to integrate into future projects

It's more challenging to get C++ working on PyPI than if it were pure Python code. There is some discussion about how to do that here https://github.com/VasiliBaranov/packing-generation/issues/10#issuecomment-1349765129. @MrJasonBear do you mind looking into this more to see if it's feasible?

[sgbaird]

Some other resources:

• https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/guides/packaging-binary-extensions/
• https://realpython.com/python-bindings-overview/