Russell E. Owen wrote: > > I'm curious why the low level stuff is in C instead of C++? I would have > thought that C++ templates and possibly even the standard template > library would be a huge win for coding array-type classes. I don't know the specifics for numpy, but C++ has huge problems compared to C for code which is meant to be used by other languages: C++ has no ABI standard, loading C++ classes dynamically through dlopen mechanisms is difficult (it basically means rewriting a C api over C++, AFAIK). Also, template are extremely difficult to use in a sensible way, and many advanced tricks using templates are not well supported by often used compilers (looking at boost sources for compiler specific workaround would give you an idea); in numeric codes, template are useful to have one implementation for all the C type availble (float, double, int, etc...), but those are cases which can easily be generated by code generator tools (like autogen; numpy is using its own).
There are cases where C++ is useful compared to C++; I don't think numpy is one of them, David _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list Numpy-discussion@scipy.org http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
