[SciPy-dev] fft

[Pearu Peterson]

On Mon, 10 Feb 2003, Chuck Harris wrote:

> > > By the way, what happened to the other fft package that was being
> > > discussed?
> > 
> > What other fft package?
> 
> I must be confused, but weren't you folks benchmarking another package?

Indeed, there was a discussion about replacing scipy.fftpack with fftpack2
about half a year ago and it is completed by now. The current
scipy.fftpack is fftpack2 and it differs from the original scipy.fftpack
in that it wraps djbfft and fftw libraries when available, otherwise the
underlying implementation of the fft algorithm is fftpack from netlib.

The fact that scipy.fftpack uses netlib/fftpack format for real fft is
almost a coincidence (there were certain license issues with GPL'd
fftw so that scipy could not use it as a default implementation of
fft). I guess, if scipy.fftpack would have originally based on the fftw
library, may be the format would be different now.

Personally, I don't have any preferences on the fft output format, we
just have to choose one and stick to it. And the choice was made too long
ago to change it again.

Pearu