[Numpy-discussion] Choosing between NumPy and SciPy functions

[David Cournapeau]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 5:24 AM, Sturla Molden <sturla.molden at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Is this an option for us?  Aren't we a little behind the performance
> > curve on FFT after we lost FFTW?
>
> It does not run on Windows because it uses POSIX to allocate executable
> memory for tasklets, as i understand it.
>
> By the way, why did we loose FFTW, apart from GPL? One thing to mention
> here is that MKL supports the FFTW APIs. If we can use MKL for linalg and
> numpy.dot I don't see why we cannot use it for FFT.
>

The problem is APIs: MKL, Accelerate, etc... all use a standard API
(BLAS/LAPACK), but for FFT, you need to reimplement pretty much the whole
thing. Unsurprisingly, this meant the code was not well maintained.

Wrapping non standard, non-BSD libraries makes much more sense in separate
libraries in general.

David



> On Mac there is also vDSP in Accelerate framework which has an insanely
> fast FFT (also claimed to be faster than FFTW). Since it is a system
> library there should be no license problems.
>
> There are clearly options if someone wants to work on it and maintain it.
>
> Sturla
>
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