[SciPy-user] how to build in fftw3 support?

[David Cournapeau]

Lin Shao wrote:
>
> Sure, I did notice that, but for 1-d FFT who cares that much about
> which package to use.

I would say that many people care, since that's the transforms that 
people contributing new backends did implement.

>
> I'm sorry, but I meant "outsiders to fftpack", not to scipy in general.

Although I did not write the original code (Pearu Peterson and David M 
Cooke did), I did rewrote some backends, and I am in the middle of 
heavily refactoring it, so I would say I know it fairly well.

Here is the story as I understand it: a few years ago, the initial 
scipy.fftpack was written, with fftpack as a backend, as the name 
suggested. Some functions could also use other backends (fftw, djbfft). 
As people contributed some functions, the code became unmaintainable. I 
wanted to speed-up the fftw3 backend, but this was too difficult with 
the code at that time (the code for all backends was mixed up), so I 
refactored it one first time.

Now, I am refactoring it even more: the goal is to have totally separate 
implementation for each backend. That should make contribution easier, also.

cheers,

David