Re: [Numpy-discussion] Numpy x Matlab: some synthetic benchmarks

[Travis O. <oli...@ee...>]

>>
> Here's an idea Fernando and I have briefly talked about off-list, but 
> which perhaps bears talking about here: Is there speed to be gained by 
> an alternative, very simple, very optimized ndarray constructor? The 
> idea would be a special-case constructor with very limited 
> functionality designed purely for speed. It wouldn't support (m)any of 
> the fantastic things Travis has done, but would be useful only in 
> specialized use cases, such as creating indices.
>
> I'm not familiar enough with what the normal constructor does to know 
> if we could implement something, (in C, perhaps) that would do nothing 
> but create a simple, contiguous array significantly faster than what 
> is currently done. Or does the current constructor create a new 
> instance about as fast as possible? I know Travis has optimized it, 
> but it's a general purpose constructor, and I'm thinking these extra 
> features may take some extra CPU cycles.


I think the indexing code will be slower because it is more 
sophisticated than Numeric's.   Basically, it has to check for fancy 
indexing before defaulting to the old way.   I see this as more of a 
slow-down than array creation.   It might be possible to improve it --- 
more eyeballs are always helpful.  But, I'm not sure how at this point.

-Travis