On Jun 10, 2010, at 11:48 AM, Sturla Molden wrote: > > I have a few radical suggestions:
There are some good ideas there. I suspect we can't address all of them in the course of this re-factoring effort, but I really appreciate you putting them out there, because they are useful things to consider. > > 1. Use ctypes as glue to the core DLL, so we can completely forget about > refcounts and similar mess. Why put manual reference counting and error > handling in the core? It's stupid. If we could get to a single core DLL, then perhaps this would work. It may be very difficult to actually get to that point though from where we are because there is a lot to the current CPython interface that would have to be re-thought. Right now, it looks like there is still a need for an interface layer. > > 2. The core should be a plain DLL, loadable with ctypes. (I know David > Cournapeau and Robert Kern is going to hate this.) But if Python can have a > custom loader for .pyd files, so can NumPy for it's core DLL. For ctypes we > just need to specify a fully qualified path to the DLL, which can be read > from a config file or whatever. This approach does not build a new Python type in compiled code. There are speed disadvantages to this --- especially for the numpy scalars. > > 5. Allow OpenMP pragmas in the core. If arrays are above a certain size, it > should switch to multi-threading. This is an interesting idea. -Travis _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
