rust-ndarray VS mypyc

I would love some examples of how to do non-trivial data interop between Rust and Python. My experience is that PyO3/Maturin is excellent when converting between simple datatypes but conversions get difficult when there are non-standard types, e.g. Python Numpy arrays or Rust ndarrays or whatever other custom thing.

Polars seems to have a good model where it uses the Arrow in memory format, which has implementations in Python and Rust, and makes a lot of the ndarray stuff easier. However, if the Rust libraries are not written with Arrow first, they become quite hard to work with. For example, there are many libraries written with https://github.com/rust-ndarray/ndarray, which is challenging to interop with Numpy.

(I am not an expert at all, please correct me if my characterizations are wrong!)

Thanks for sharing. I read this issue on why ndarray does not have a dynamically typed array: https://github.com/rust-ndarray/ndarray/issues/651

You can get involved with the ndarray project

Sadly Ndarray does look a little abandoned to me: https://github.com/rust-ndarray/ndarray

The date of the last commit of [ndarray](https://github.com/rust-ndarray/ndarray) lies 6 month in the past while many recent issues are open and untouched.

While looking through ndarrays src, I came across a set of functions that explicitly unroll 8 variables on each iteration of a loop, with the comment eightfold unrolled so that floating point can be vectorized (even with strict floating point accuracy semantics). I don't understand why floats would be affected by unrolling, and in general I'm confused as to how explicit unrolling differs from iterating through each element one by one. I assumed this would be a scenario where the compiler would optimize best anyway, which seems to be confirmed (at least in the context of using iter() rather than for) here. Could anyone give a little context into what this, or any explicit unrolling achieves?

Burn is different: it is built around the Backend trait which encapsulates tensor primitives. Even the reverse mode automatic differentiation is just a backend that wraps another one using the decorator pattern. The goal is to make it very easy to create optimized backends and support different devices and use cases. For now, there are only 3 backends: NdArray (https://github.com/rust-ndarray/ndarray) for a pure rust solution, Tch (https://github.com/LaurentMazare/tch-rs) for an easy access to CUDA and cuDNN optimized operations and the ADBackendDecorator making any backend differentiable. I am now refactoring the internal backend API to make it as easy as possible to plug in new ones.

Looks like it's an open request

https://github.com/rust-ndarray/ndarray/issues/281

Answer: you can’t with this crate. I implemented a dynamic n-dim solution myself but it uses views of integer indices that get copied to a new array, which have indexes to another flattened array in order to avoid duplication of possibly massive amounts of n-dimensional data; using the crate alone, copying all the array data would be unavoidable.

Ultimately I’ve had to make my own axis shifting and windowing mechanisms. But the crate is still a useful lib and continuing effort.

While I don’t mind getting into the weeds, these kinds of side efforts can really impact context focus so it’s just something to be aware of.

In principle you're trying to convert between columnar and row-based data layouts, something that happens fairly often in data science. I bet there's some hyper-efficient SIMD magic that could be invoked for these slicing operations (and maybe the iterator solution does exactly that). Might be worth taking a look at how the relevant Rust libraries like ndarray do it.

That would be interesting! You might already be aware. But there's mypyc[0], which is an AOT compiler for Python code with type hints (that, IIRC, mypy uses to compile itself into a native extension).

Wanted to give you a head-start on the lit-review for your students I guess :)

[0] https://github.com/mypyc/mypyc

https://github.com/mypyc/mypyc

> Mypyc compiles Python modules to C extensions. It uses standard Python type hints to generate fast code. Mypyc uses mypy to perform type checking and type inference.

> Mypyc can compile anything from one module to an entire codebase. The mypy project has been using mypyc to compile mypy since 2019, giving it a 4x performance boost over regular Python.

I have not experience a 4x boost, rather between 1.5x and 2x. I guess it depends on the code.

Funny how emergence works with tools. Give a language too few tools but viral circumstances - the ecosystem diverges (Lisps, Javascript). Give it too long an iteration time but killer guarantees, you end up with committees. Python not falling into either of these traps should be understood as nothing short of magic in emergence.

I only recently discovered that python's reference typechecker, mypy, has a small side project for typed python to emit C [1], written entirely in python. Nowadays with python's rich specializer ecosystem (LLVM, CUDA, and just generally vectorized math), the value of writing a small program in anything else diminishes quickly.

Imagine reading the C++wg release notes in the same mood that you would the python release notes.

[1] https://github.com/mypyc/mypyc

> Note that the mypyc issue tracker lives in this repository! Please don't file mypyc issues in the mypy issue tracker.

See https://github.com/mypyc/mypyc/blob/master/show_me_the_code....

And mypyc https://github.com/mypyc/mypyc

More recent approaches include mypyc which is (on the tin) quite close to what you describe, and taichi that lives in between.

Have you encountered mypyc?

https://github.com/mypyc/mypyc

> Mypyc compiles Python modules to C extensions. It uses standard Python type hints to generate fast code. Mypyc uses mypy to perform type checking and type inference.

Regarding the large execution time mentioned in your article, I discovered (mypyc)[https://github.com/mypyc/mypyc] on this subreddit in a post from the black formatter team https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/v2009i/im_that_person_who_got_black_compiled_with_mypyc/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share