RFR: IO cleanup

[Chris Colbert]

see inline comments:

On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 2:02 PM, Maël Primet <mael.primet at gmail.com> wrote:

> Well,
>
> perhaps we should talk about this a little more, because there are many
> aspects:
> - of course, Cython has a more clean feeling
> - however, it is still not as efficient as C (for some of the code I
> published, I tried the Cython version first, then switched to C when I saw
> that it was too slow)
>

I suspect this has more to do with how you've written the Cython versus the
speed of Cython vs C. Cython is *very* fast when properly used.


>
- some older user of the library, less able with python, might still want to
> develop C code and bind it if there is an easy way to do it
>

Since our data structure is a numpy array, manipulating that pointer in C
would take an awful lot of knowledge about NumPy internals. Raising an
exception even moreso. It would be less effort for said person to just learn
Cython.


> - it is interesting to have some simple C core code, like a function that
> takes arrays as double * and (w, h) integers, because it enables easy reuse
> of the core of the algorithm for some other projects (without having to
> include the whole library) if someone only wants to extract one or two
> algorithm (this might be interesting when we develop research code and some
> private company want to use the algorithm )
>
>
There is nothing stopping you from doing that in your own personal library.
But seeing as how we creating a library for image processing in Python, I
think we should use the best available tools for Python, thus making things
most accessible and maintainable to our target audience.
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