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Re: [pygame] vector type: mutable or immutable
Hi all,
I think this discussion got a little bit out of hand.
I probably shouldn't have posted those numbers.
I would like to get this thread back on track.
But after that I shortly want to answer the questions from Gregor's last mail 
and append the relevant sctions of my code.
so here we go "mutable or immutable":
So if I may try to summarize:
mutable:
========
 * Stuart Axon: mainly consistency with rects
 * René Dudfield: personally uses list more often than tuples
 * Casey Duncan: consistency with rects and performance concerns
immutable:
==========
 * Brian Fisher: immutable prevent subtle bugs
 * Marcus von Appen: no reason given
 * Gregor Lingl: should behave more like numbers than like list
 * Lorenz Quack: personally thinks the presented argument for immutable are 
stronger
So would anyone have strong objections if we go with immutable?
Vectors would then behave more like a mix of floats and tuples :)
what follows is the response to the Gregor:
Gregor Lingl wrote:
Lorenz Quack schrieb:
>>> a = 2
>>> a += a
I believe the interpreter internally takes the two operands (in this 
case a and a)  adds them and then rebinds the result to a (the id 
changes) so effectively doing
>>> a = a + a
exactly because a is immutable
if a were mutable the two expressions would be indeed different the += 
version would not create a new instance and rebind the name a to it 
but modify the object a is referring to, while a = a + a would again 
create a new object and rebind it.
So therefore I believe that this test does make sense.
Tell me if I'm wrong somewhere.
here are the calls with the results:
[snip]
which has more than 30000 digits. Which result did you get after 
10000000 executions of the statement x = x + x?
And which implementation of the long integer type did you use that is 
that much faster than Python's ?
Regards,
Gregor
indeed those are valid objections. well first of all I used a 
self-written C extension with double as the underlying type. but the 
result after 1023 iterations turns into (inf, inf). this could of 
course invalidate the results so I modified the test:
>>> timeit.repeat("x = Vector2d(2,3); x += x", "from vector import 
Vector2d", repeat=5, number=10000000)
[5.1832518577575684,
 5.1106431484222412,
 5.1510121822357178,
 5.0923140048980713,
 5.0608019828796387]
>>> timeit.repeat("x = Vector2d(2,3); x = x + x", "from vector import 
Vector2d", repeat=5, number=10000000)
[6.5348029136657715,
 6.3499071598052979,
 6.4433431625366211,
 6.412431001663208,
 6.4398849010467529]
>>> timeit.repeat("x = Vector2d(2,3)", "from vector import Vector2d", 
repeat=5, number=10000000)
[3.7264928817749023,
 3.6346859931945801,
 3.6241021156311035,
 3.7733709812164307,
 3.6264529228210449]
Did you use two different Vector2d classes here, one mutable and one 
immutable? Why do they
have the same name then? Or did you merely implement the operations x+=x 
and x=x+x differently?
The latter. Same class just once use the "nb_add" callback (or from a python 
persprctive: "__add__") and once the "nb_inplace_add" callback (or again from 
python: "__iadd__")
If x = x + y creates a new object x or changes x is also a matter of how 
it is implemented.
not really. when the "nb_add" C callback (or "__add__" for that matter) is 
called you have no way of knowing what the caller is going to do with the 
result. so from inside that callback you cannot distinguish between
>>> x = x + y
and
>>> z = x + y
so you really don't have a choice but to return a new object.
Moreover it is my conviction  that one must not decide  about  which 
data type to use on
the basis of a +- 50 percent difference in performance.
ok.
One more remark: At least on module of the standard library of Python 
has a (rather simple)
2d-Vector class implemented in pure Python, which of course has a 
considerably worse performance,
by a factor of 4 approximately:
 >>> timeit.repeat("x = Vec2D(2,3); x = x + x", "from turtle import 
Vec2D", repeat=1, number=10000000)
[25.274672320512536]
Nevertheless one would expect a class implemented in C to run *much* 
faster than a pure Python solution.
So I suspect that your implementation may not be sufficiently 
significant to serve as a criterion to
decide that issue.
Best regards,
Gregor
.
so here comes the boild down version of my code:
#define PyVector2d_Check(v)  PyObject_TypeCheck(v, &PyVector2d_Type)
#define PyVector3d_Check(v)  PyObject_TypeCheck(v, &PyVector3d_Type)
#define PyVector4d_Check(v)  PyObject_TypeCheck(v, &PyVector4d_Type)
#define PyVectorNd_Check(v)  (PyVector4d_Check(v) || PyVector3d_Check(v) || 
PyVector2d_Check(v))
static PyObject *
PyVectorNd_add(PyObject *o1, PyObject *o2)
{
    int i;
    if (PyVectorNd_Check(o1)) {
        int dim = ((PyVectorNd*)o1)->dim;
        if (checkPyVectorNdCompatible(o2, dim)) {
            PyVectorNd *ret = (PyVectorNd*)PyVectorNd_NEW(dim);
            for (i = 0; i < dim; i++) {
                ret->data[i] = ((PyVectorNd*)o1)->data[i] + 
PySequence_GetItem_AsDouble(o2, i);
            }
            return (PyObject*)ret;
        }
    }
    else {
        int dim = ((PyVectorNd*)o2)->dim;
        if (checkPyVectorNdCompatible(o1, dim)) {
            PyVectorNd *ret = (PyVectorNd*)PyVectorNd_NEW(dim);
            for (i = 0; i < dim; i++) {
                ret->data[i] = PySequence_GetItem_AsDouble(o1, i) + 
((PyVectorNd*)o2)->data[i];
            }
            return (PyObject*)ret;
        }
    }
    Py_INCREF(Py_NotImplemented);
    return Py_NotImplemented;
}
static PyObject *
PyVectorNd_inplace_add(PyVectorNd *self, PyObject *other)
{
    int i;
    if (checkPyVectorNdCompatible(other, self->dim)) {
        for (i = 0; i < self->dim; i++) {
            self->data[i] += PySequence_GetItem_AsDouble(other, i);
        }
        Py_INCREF(self);
        return (PyObject*)self;
    }
    Py_INCREF(Py_NotImplemented);
    return Py_NotImplemented;
}
static PyObject *
PyVectorNd_NEW(int dim)
{
    PyVectorNd *object;
    switch (dim) {
    case 2:
        object = PyObject_New(PyVectorNd, &PyVector2d_Type);
        break;
    case 3:
        object = PyObject_New(PyVectorNd, &PyVector3d_Type);
        break;
    case 4:
        object = PyObject_New(PyVectorNd, &PyVector4d_Type);
        break;
    default:
        fprintf(stderr, "Error: wrong internal call to PyVectorNd_NEW.\n");
        exit(1);
    }
    if (object != NULL) {
        object->dim = dim;
        object->epsilon = FLT_EPSILON;
        object->data = PyMem_New(double, dim);
        if (object->data == NULL) {
            return PyErr_NoMemory();
        }
    }
    else {
        fprintf(stderr, "FAILURE: could not create new PyVectorNd object!\n");
    }
    return (PyObject *)object;
}
Note that the main difference between the two (PyVectorNd_add and 
PyVectorNd_inplace_add) in this case is mainly a call to PyVectorNd_Check and 
PyVectorNd_NEW.
And again: I'm not really here to discuss this particular code or look for 
optimizations.
regards,
//Lorenz