Hi,
you will by now have noticed that this is a rather hotly debated topic.
A few pragmatic remarks:
- the polys module, as it stands, works very well, and is used all
throughout sympy (implicitly or explicitly)
- by itself, this is no reason to copy its design
- it is essentially impossible to prove or refute the claim that using a
C-style architecture yields superior performance [*]
The following is my personal view on the matter. I do not have much
justification for it beyond what I am saying directly here. In
particular I am not saying this is the way things should be done.
- writing "C-style" python yields the performance of python and the
readability of C
- hence don't do it
- python code can be expected to perform well, as long as the frequency
of function calls stays low
- hence if you find your code slowed down by excessively performing
low-level operations on your objects, implement said low-level
operation in C
I am not entirely sure how practical the last suggestion is (in
particular regarding our "pure python" mentality).
I see python as great way to write high-level algorithms. If it is not
perfect for implementing e.g. low-level polynomial arithmetic then so be
it; write your highlevel algorithms to work with a well-specified
polynomial arithmetic interface, and implement that in C (or cython).
Best,
Tom
[*] The only way to refute the claim is to re-implement polys in a more
object-oriented style, which is most likely not going to happen (it is a
huge amount of work).
On 14.05.2013 14:23, Saurabh Jha wrote:
Hi,
I recently had a discussion with Ronan on irc on the polys module and
he made the point that using functions instead of classes do not lead
to increase in speed as pointed out in [1].
He made the following points--
the benchmarks are flawed because
1) they are too short (good benchmarks last for seconds, not
milliseconds)
2) they use his design, so cannot be used as a justification of his
design
I feel that the current polys module is not very substantially
different from the one proposed in [1]. I would you request you all to
give your views on this issues, on the adequacy of the polys
architecture, partly because of it's importance in sympy and partly
because my proposal is based on the architecture of the current polys
module[2].
I myself like the polys architecture.
[1]http://mattpap.github.io/masters-thesis/html/index.html
[2]http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/proposal/review/google/gsoc2013/
saurabh_jha/11001
-Saurabh
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