Strange array.array performance

[Maxim Khitrov]

On Thu, Feb 19, 2009 at 2:35 PM, Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2009-02-19 12:52, Maxim Khitrov wrote:
>>
>> Hello all,
>>
>> I'm currently writing a Python<->  MATLAB interface with ctypes and
>> array.array class, using which I'll need to push large amounts of data
>> to MATLAB.
>
> Have you taken a look at mlabwrap?
>
>  http://mlabwrap.sourceforge.net/
>
> At the very least, you will probably want to use numpy arrays instead of
> array.array.
>
>  http://numpy.scipy.org/

I have, but numpy is not currently available for python 2.6, which is
what I need for some other features, and I'm trying to keep the
dependencies down in any case. Mlabwrap description doesn't mention if
it is thread-safe, and that's another one of my requirements.

The only feature that I'm missing with array.array is the ability to
quickly pre-allocate large chunks of memory. To do that right now I'm
using array('d', (0,) * size). It would be nice if array accepted an
int as the second argument indicating how much memory to allocate and
initialize to 0.

- Max