[Numpy-discussion] when did column_stack become C-contiguous?

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Sun, Oct 18, 2015 at 9:35 PM,  <josef.pktd at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> np.column_stack((np.ones(10), np.ones(10))).flags
>   C_CONTIGUOUS : True
>   F_CONTIGUOUS : False
>
>>>> np.__version__
> '1.9.2rc1'
>
>
> on my notebook which has numpy 1.6.1 it is f_contiguous
>
>
> I was just trying to optimize a loop over variable adjustment in regression,
> and found out that we lost fortran contiguity.
>
> I always thought column_stack is for fortran usage (linalg)
>
> What's the alternative?
> column_stack was one of my favorite commands, and I always assumed we have
> in statsmodels the right memory layout to call the linalg libraries.
>
> ("assumed" means we don't have timing nor unit tests for it.)

In general practice no numpy functions make any guarantee about memory
layout, unless that's explicitly a documented part of their contract
(e.g. 'ascontiguous', or some functions that take an order= argument
-- I say "some" b/c there are functions like 'reshape' that take an
argument called order= that doesn't actually refer to memory layout).
This isn't so much an official policy as just a fact of life -- if
no-one has any idea that the someone is depending on some memory
layout detail then there's no way to realize that we've broken
something. (But it is a good policy IMO.)

If this kind of problem gets caught during a pre-release cycle then we
generally do try to fix it, because we try not to break code, but if
it's been broken for 2 full releases then there's no much we can do --
we can't go back in time to fix it so it sounds like you're stuck
working around the problem no matter what (unless you want to refuse
to support 1.9.0 through 1.10.1, which I assume you don't... worst
case, you just have to do a global search replace of np.column_stack
with statsmodels.utils.column_stack_f, right?).

And the regression issue seems like the only real argument for
changing it back -- we'd never guarantee f-contiguity here if starting
from a blank slate, I think?

-n

-- 
Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org