[Numpy-discussion] copying ctypes arrays to numarray?

[Todd Miller]

On Thu, 2004-12-16 at 20:04, RJ wrote:
> Doh.
> Thanks Todd,
> 
> At 04:55 PM 12/16/2004 -0500, Todd Miller wrote:
> >   try: repr(src._data)
> ...
> > Other buffers, e.g. a string, might not.
> 
> Which is fine for this app, so I will.
> 
> > It looks to me like you forgot to import Numeric 
> 
> Yep. I screwed up the import statements - I'll re-do it tomorrow. In
> that light, it is interesting that the assign N were always longer
> than the n ones...
> 
> > To be safe, check the .is_c_array() method.
> 
> Will do. I am also a little concerned about the address changing in a
> long-running process (literally, weeks), so I might check that too.

As long as you let the NumArray allocate its own memory,  it will
allocate a numarray.memory object and those don't move.  If you resize
the array,  that's a different story...

> Also, why is assignment from a (ctypes.c_long * 2000)() to a numarray
> so much slower than a memmove()? Does the assign make a temp buffer?

For the assignment to numarray,  I think the ctype is opaque and as a
result Python uses the sequence protocol;  this is a huge amount of work
compared to a tight C loop moving bytes.  I think every 4 bytes the
ctype is doing a method call and building a Python long,  numarray is
doing a method call and extracting a Python long,  then the Python long
is destructed.

I may be missing something,  but the comparisons of for loop, map, and
slice look like they're only doing 1000 moves but the array assigments
are doing 10000,  so I think there's another factor of 10 missing in
that comparison.