Charles R Harris wrote:
>
> Well, what you want might be very easy to do in python, we just need
> to check the default alignments for doubles and floats for some of the
> other compilers, architectures, and OS's out there. On the other hand,
> you might not be able to request a c malloc that is aligned in a
> portable way without resorting to the same tricks as you do in python.
> So why not use python and get the reference counting and garbage
> collection along with it?
First, doing it in python means that I cannot use the facility from C
easily. But this is exactly where I need it, and where I would guess
most people need it. People want to interface numpy with the mkl ? They
will do it in C, right ? And maybe I am just too dumb to see the
problem, but I don't see the need for garbage collection and so on :)
Again, what is needed is:
- aligned allocator -> we can use the one from Steven Johnson, used
in fftw, which support more or less the same archs than numpy
- Refactor the array creation functions in C such as the
implementation takes one additional alignement argument, and the
original functions are kept identical to before
- Add a few utilities function to check whether it is SSE aligned,
arbitrary aligned, etc...
The only non trivial point is 2 . Actually, when I first thought about
it, I thought about fixing alignement at compile time, which would have
made it totally avoidable: it would have been a simple change of the
definition of PyDataMem_New to an aligned malloc with a constant. I have
already the code for this, and besides aligned malloc code, it is like a
5 lines change of numpy code, nothing terrible, really.
David
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