[SciPy-user] NumPy vs. SciPy and other speed comparisons

[Pearu Peterson]

Robert Kern wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 05:33, Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Jun 11, 2008 at 05:06, Pearu Peterson <pearu at cens.ioc.ee> wrote:
> 
>>> We used to have postponed import hooks for that in past
>>> but afaik we dropped these because they were hackish and at some moment
>>> the time of importing scipy improved (I think it was in Python 2.4 or
>>> 2.5) considerably.
>> The problem is that we left scipy.pkgload in, and creating that from
>> numpy._import_tools.PackageLoader implicitly adds all of the
>> subpackages to scipy.__all__.
> 
> Correction: we actually do call pkgload(postpone=True). However, even
> with the postponed import (which does not add any proxy objects), it
> still appends to __all__. I believe the following patch to numpy fixes
> the problem, but I'm not sure if leaving the if clause alone is
> correct in all cases:
> 
> Index: numpy/_import_tools.py
> ===================================================================
> --- numpy/_import_tools.py      (revision 5245)
> +++ numpy/_import_tools.py      (working copy)
> @@ -183,9 +183,6 @@
>              postpone_import = getattr(info_module,'postpone_import',False)
>              if (postpone and not global_symbols) \
>                     or (postpone_import and postpone is not None):
> -                self.log('__all__.append(%r)' % (package_name))
> -                if '.' not in package_name:
> -                    self.parent_export_names.append(package_name)
>                  continue
> 
>              old_object = frame.f_locals.get(package_name,None)
> 
> 
> This can probably go into numpy 1.1.1 as a bugfix, so I don't think
> it's critical to work around it in scipy/__init__.py.

The patch does not affect the 'from scipy import *' time much.
In my computer it is around 0.62secs in both cases when having
names in __all__ or not.

The long import seems to be due to scipy/linalg/iterative.py that
imports scipy.sparse which takes most of the import time. And 
scipy.linalg should not be imported when importing scipy.
So, I think the real reason is hiding somewhere else.. I am looking into 
it...

Pearu