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Hey David, When we put the fft library together back in 2001-2002, there wasn't a good alternative for a fast fft package that wasn't GPLed. fftw was reasonably fast and fully functioning, but GPLed. fftpack had the functionality, but not the speed. djbfft (at the time) was noticeably faster than either of these for its important subset of functionality (radix 2), but wasn't full featured. The combination of djbfft and fftpack gave us a BSD compatible and fast library for SciPy. This was the combination that we used to build the binaries that were available from the scipy.org website. Having been out of the building SciPy game for a while, my question would be, what fft libraries are used now to build the binaries for scipy.org? Are they using fftpack only? If so, they are likely much slower than they need to be. My guess is that the binaries are not linked to MKL or FFTW because of licensing issues. Is there another alternative that we can use now that is fast, BSD compatible, and simpler to build? I'm very sympathetic to build issues, so if getting rid of djbfft simplifies things, then it is well worth considering. If, on the other hand, it results in slow-ish fft algorithms in the SciPy provided binaries, this also needs to be weighed as a drawback. eric On May 12, 2008, at 9:59 AM, David Cournapeau wrote:
Hi,
I would like to ask again about dropping djbfft support. Djbfft is a fft implementation, which has not been updated since 1999, and is not packaged by most linux distributions (I quite doubt anyone on windows is using it). Also, because it only supports 2^n sizes, it has to be used simultaneously with another backend (fftpack, fftw, fftw3, etc....). The later is why I would like to drop it: it is quite a PITA to test all combinations, and it takes a lot of time for maybe one or two users out there. I would much prefer spending times on improving things like our fftw3 support, float support, etc...
cheers,
David _______________________________________________ Scipy-dev mailing list Scipy-dev@scipy.org http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/scipy-dev