[Numpy-discussion] Numpy x Matlab: some synthetic benchmarks

[Travis Oliphant]

Andrew Straw wrote:

> Here's an idea Fernando and I have briefly talked about off-list, but 
> which perhaps bears talking about here: Is there speed to be gained by 
> an alternative, very simple, very optimized ndarray constructor? The 
> idea would be a special-case constructor with very limited 
> functionality designed purely for speed. It wouldn't support (m)any of 
> the fantastic things Travis has done, but would be useful only in 
> specialized use cases, such as creating indices.

The general purpose constructor is

PyArray_NewFromDescr(...)

I suspect this could be special cased for certain circumstances and the 
special-case called occasionally. Their are checks on the dimensions 
that could be avoided in certain circumstances (like when we are getting 
the dimensions from another arrayobject already...)

We could also inline the __array_from_strides code...

Besides that, I'm not sure what else to optimize...

-Travis