David Cournapeau <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Hi there,
>
> I am a recently convert of python, which I started using for my
> numerical computing needs (I am a PhD student in signal processing) to
> replace matlab.
>
> For those who do not know matlab, it is a big (and expensive)
> software which implements a 'language' optimized for linear algebra, and
> with time becomes one of the most used software for numerical
> computation. In my field of research (signal processing), matlab is
> almost a standard (by standard, I mean everybody knows it and uses it).
> I think python with numpy/scipy is better in almost any way if you are
> ready to invest some time.
>
> Now, concerning pypy. The main idea of numpy is to give an array
> class to python, so that most inner loops are not interpreted, but run
> in Cpython or through highly optimized fortran libraries. In those
> cases, python is fast enough for most cases. But there are some cases
> where this paradigm of using linear algebra to speed things up does not
> work really well (recursive algorithms); in those case, the loop +
> function call cost of python makes any implementation for non toy
> problems really slow. Right now, the only choice is to code the thing in
> C, with a big loss on the flexibility side.
>
> I was wondering if pypy has some solution/new approaches to this
> problem. For example, when using numpy, I would suspect that many
> functions calls are 'static', that is always expect the same type of
> arguments; also, for simple loop on integers, my understanding is that
> JIT compilation has some nice solution to give to have much better
> performances (matlab has a JIT compiler to make loop faster for
> interpreted code).
It may be that the JIT is good for this sort of code. It's not yet
though :-)
> It looks like at some point, there was some work done in pypy
> relatively to numpy arrays, but I didn't find any documentation on
> that.
As far as I'm aware this was something else: teaching PyPy's annotator
to recognise code that uses Numeric arrays and the code generator how
to compile this to equivalent code that manipulates arrays at a lower
level. This could be seen as an alternative to rewriting your code in
C. I'm not sure what the state of this code is, but I don't think
it's very advanced.
Cheers,
mwh
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