[PYTHON MATRIX-SIG] which fft library should I do?

[David Ascher]

While I have started work on a module to the fft routines in the SGI
complib.sgimath library, I'm thinking that maybe I should do something
which is 1) better tested (there are things like "array of size
2*((n+2)/2)" in the man pages), and 2) more portable (e.g. would work on
my PC).

I've looked around on the web, and there are more FFT packages out there
than there should be. =)  Netlib's FFTPACK is fine, but it's only in
Fortran (the fft.c file doesn't seem to be a straight port -- it seems
to change the function names, for example).

I think that the library used should come in C at least, and in Fortran
if possible, mostly due to the portability problem.  While "serious" fft
users would probably do it on a fast machine w/ a fortran library, I
think that I want to be able to do FFT on MacPython or PythonWin without
a fortran compiler.

I think the first goal of an fft module for Python would be to be
relatively generic and relatively simple.  It should do at least 1, 2
and 3 dims.  It should deal with floats, doubles, and float and double
complex.  

I don't think that I want to worry about routines which are optimized
for, say, multiple even sequences with only odd wave numbers.

Any suggestions?

--david

PS: How bad of a performance hit does one take w/ f2c-output code as
opposed to handcoded C on code like this?


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