On Thu, May 30, 2013 at 11:29 PM, Nicolas Rougier <nicolas.roug...@inria.fr> wrote:
>> I'm also concerned about the overhead of >> ctypes, given that there are already so many required optimizations in >> the matplotlib freetype wrapper to make it fast enough. But I'm willing >> to hold judgement on that until some measurements have been made. >> > > I would never have thought ctypes would be a problem for speed/optimization > and I never benchmarked the freetype-py. Well, I see it this way -- for high performing Python code, you often need to "vectorize" operations one way or another. i.e. if you need to do a given operation on a bunch of numbers, objects, whatever, you need to be able to pass the collection in to lower-level code, so you dont have all the overhead of python funciton calls, dynamic typing, etc, inside your loop. Many (most) C libraries are not designed this way. So when writing python wrappers, you need to loop though a sequence in python, and call the underlying c function for each item. With ctypes, you write that code inPython, with cython, it's easy to write that code in cython, which gets compiled down to C -- you can get major performance benefits from this. And Cython is almost at easy to write as Python. How this applied to freetype, I don't know. >> 2) It's not Numpy-aware. For example, it loads image buffers into >> regular Python lists. This really should use Numpy for speed. you can do this with ctypes, and would work fine for image buffers, by many not as well as Cython for say, a large sequence of characters... -Chris -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception chris.bar...@noaa.gov ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ How ServiceNow helps IT people transform IT departments: 1. A cloud service to automate IT design, transition and operations 2. Dashboards that offer high-level views of enterprise services 3. A single system of record for all IT processes http://p.sf.net/sfu/servicenow-d2d-j _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-devel mailing list Matplotlib-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-devel
