[Numpy-discussion] How to call methods from a class with custom matrices parameters with numpy arrays ?

[David Cournapeau]

Matthieu Brucher wrote:
>
>     Doing the wrapping in an object oriented way is difficult, and maybe
>     not that useful. This does not prevent the API exposed to python
>     to be
>     OO, of course.
>
>
>
> I have some difficulties to do this in an automated way...
> I'm trying now to make a derived object from my function, without 
> templates and, I'm hoping so, with a correct interface i.e. double + 
> 2*int to save make the conversions with numpy arrays.
>  
>
>     > That works great for C then, not that well for C++...
>     Well, this is an inherent problem of C++ when you try to use it from
>     other languages, but let's not start this (again :) ),
>
>
>
> :D
>
>  
>
>     The example shows basic wrapping, and some facilities provided by
>     numpy to help. Again, ctype is pretty efficient as long as you do not
>     need to do convertion. If you call it thousand of times, it will be
>     slow, but this is more or less inherent to python (function calls are
>     nowhere near as fast as in a compiled language, at least for now).
>
>
>
> It's for optimization, so the function will be called several hundreds 
> of times, I suppose, and I tried porting the whole function to Python, 
> but I'm not sure that the Python version behaves like the C++ version 
> - the results are not identic, so... -, thus the wrapping.
A couple of hundred times is OK if the called function is doing 
something. I once benchmarked ctypes with respect to function calling, 
and I could do several hundred of thousand of calls/s, if I remember 
correctly.
>
>
> It's only one class and one method + the constructor. Not much but I'm 
> a real beginner in that domain. True, I could use the C API directly...
Ok, I have a simple working example. It is actually much easier than I 
thought, because no C compiler is involved at all (I was afraid about 
object layout, vtables and other horrors), only C++.

I attached the example: it shows how to mimic a C++ class in python 
through a C-like interface. The main difficulty is to be sure that your 
object get deleted by the python interpreter, which means having a 
__del__ function. The problem is that you cannot control how python will 
destroy its things: it may "destroy" ctypes module before your object, 
which is problematic since you need it to destroy your object. The idea 
is to "force" python to keep everything in the namespace through a fake 
second argument to the destructor.

http://docs.python.org/ref/customization.html (comments on __del__ ).

David
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: hello.py
Type: text/x-python
Size: 410 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/attachments/20070420/4714dae7/attachment.py>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: hellocpp.cpp
Type: text/x-c++src
Size: 334 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/attachments/20070420/4714dae7/attachment.cpp>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: hellocpp.h
Type: text/x-chdr
Size: 232 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/attachments/20070420/4714dae7/attachment.h>
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: Makefile
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/attachments/20070420/4714dae7/attachment.ksh>