Using `duct` as a library (in a separate project)

[CodyCBakerPhD]

Originally posted by @CodyCBakerPhD in #327 (comment)

So far I haven't got any real-world need for it-- unless youve got one?

I would love to create a benchmarking library that leverages this :) (mentally reserving con/vent for this purpose)

Our work on NWB Benchmarks relied on hacking a version of Airspeed Velocity, which set out to do way too much as a package that essentially wrapped timeit with an info-capturing layer, rather like duct, and as a result was a pain to work with (even though we eventually got something out of it)

Bonus: such benchmarks could serve as the 'batch' call Yarik has previously requested

[asmacdo]

Cool! Off the top of my head heres some things we'd want to address:

• document python library
  • create an example
  • (maybe worth moving to sphinx or hugo for autodoc)
• restrict imports, audit public/private functions as suggested in original comment
• consider versioning python api separately? This way we could go to 1.0 for the CLI, while still allowing backwards incompatible changes internally.

I'm supposing you're only interested in using duct_main? Or would you want to use plot, pp, etc as well?

[CodyCBakerPhD]

pp is pretty specific to CLI rendering (and can otherwise be done very easily in normal Python usage), but the plot particularly with -o could be useful generally