[Numpy-discussion] Numpy and PEP 343

[Travis Oliphant]

Tim Hochberg wrote:

> Travis Oliphant wrote:
>
>> David M. Cooke wrote:
>>
>>> I couldn't leave it at that :-), so I wrote my bytecode idea up.
>>>
>>>  
>>>
>> I like what you've done.  It makes me wonder what could be done with 
>> just a Python-level solution (that might be easier to generalize to 
>> more data-types and operators).
>
>
> I tried hand coding stuff at the pure Python level to see how close I 
> could come to David's results. I performed the operations in chunks 
> (larger chunks than he did so that Python overhead didn't kill me) For 
> the second case he presents (2*a+3*b), I managed to get a 70% speedup. 
> While not negligible, it's a far cry from the 180% speedup I saw with 
> David's code for the same result. So while doing things at the Python 
> level would certainly be easier, the payoff isn't likely to be nearly 
> as big.


That's good information.  Still, it might be useful for more 
general-operators and data-types to have something that does essentially 
this in Python only.  

Then, if you have a simpler expression with a few select data-types you 
could have the big-speed up with something more specific.

-Travis