[Numpy-discussion] Adopt Mersenne Twister 64bit?

[Robert Kern]

On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 11:00 AM, Neal Becker <ndbecker2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Robert Kern wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 12:16 AM, Neal Becker <ndbecker2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> I guess I talked to you about 100 years ago about sharing state between numpy
>>> rng and code I have in c++ that wraps boost::random.  So is there a C-api for
>>> this RandomState object I could use to call from c++?  Maybe I could do
>>> something with that.
>>
>> There is not one currently. Cython has provisions for sharing such
>> low-level access to other Cython extensions, but I'm not sure how well
>> it works for exporting data pointers and function pointers to general
>> C/++ code. We could probably package the necessities into a struct and
>> export a pointer to it via a PyCapsule.
>>
>
> One thing this code doesn't do: it requires construction of the wrapper class
> passing in a RandomState object.  It doesn't verify you actually gave it a
> RandomState object.  It's hard to do that.  The problem as I see it is to
> perform this check, I need the RandomStateType object, which unfortunately
> mtrand.so does not export.
>
> The only way to do it is in c++ code:
>
> 1. import numpy.random
> 2. get RandomState class
> 3. call it to create RandomState instance
> 4. get the ob_type pointer.
>
> Pretty ugly:
>
>   object mod = object (handle<>
> (borrowed((PyImport_ImportModule("numpy.random")))));
>   object rs_obj = mod.attr("RandomState");
>   object rs_inst = call<object> (rs_obj.ptr(), 0);
>   RandomStateTypeObj = rs_inst.ptr()->ob_type;

PyObject_IsInstance() should be sufficient.

http://docs.python.org/2/c-api/object.html#PyObject_IsInstance

--
Robert Kern