[Numpy-discussion] failure to register ufunc loops for user defined types

David Cournapeau cournape at gmail.com
Mon Dec 5 15:07:09 EST 2011


On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 12:39 PM, Mark Wiebe <mwwiebe at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 8:58 AM, David Cournapeau <cournape at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, Dec 4, 2011 at 9:45 PM, Charles R Harris
>> <charlesr.harris at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > We'll see how much interest there is. If it becomes official you may get
>> > more feedback on features. There are some advantages to having some user
>> > types in numpy. One is that otherwise they tend to get lost, another is
>> > that
>> > having a working example or two provides a templates for others to work
>> > from, and finally they provide test material. Because official user
>> > types
>> > aren't assigned anywhere there might also be some conflicts. Maybe
>> > something
>> > like an extension types module would be a way around that. In any case,
>> > I
>> > think both rational numbers and quaternions would be useful to have and
>> > I
>> > hope there is some discussion of how to do that.
>>
>> I agree that those will be useful, but I am worried about adding more
>> stuff in multiarray. User-types should really be separated from
>> multiarray. Ideally, they should be plugins but separated from
>> multiarray would be a good first step.
>
>
> I think the object and datetime dtypes should also be moved out of the core
> multiarray module at some point.

Indeed.

> The user-type mechanism could be improved a
> lot based on Martin's feedback after he did the quaternion implementation,
> and needs further expansion to be able to support object and datetime arrays
> as currently implemented.
>
>> I realize it is a bit unfair to have this ready for Geoffray's code
>> changes, but depending on the timelines for the 2.0.0 milestone, I
>> think this would be a useful thing to have. Otherwise, if some ABI/API
>> changes are needed after 2.0, we will be dragged down with this for
>> years. I am willing to spend time on this. Geoffray, does this sound
>> acceptable to you ?
>
>
> A rational type could be added without breaking the ABI, in the same way it
> was done for datetime and half in 1.6. I think the revamp of the user-type
> mechanism needs its own NEP design document, because changing it will be a
> very delicate operation in dealing with how it interacts with the NumPy
> core, and making it much more programmer-friendly will take a fair number of
> design iterations.

I am not worried about breaking the ABI when adding it, but rather
with the issues once we remove it to put it somewhere else. In that
sense, adding it for 1.7 is not much of an issue, but having it in 2.x
more concerned.

How difficult do you think it would be to separate it at least at the
API level (i.e. it would still be in multiarray.so/ufunc.so, but as
clearly separate as possible) ? A few days of work or more ?

David



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