Use Proxies to make indexable ndarrays about ndarray HOT 5 CLOSED

At this point, using Proxy is an absolute no-go. Wrapping an object in a Proxy automatically makes everything prohibitively slow, even if Proxy handlers are essentially no-ops. So, unfortunately, using Proxy is an interesting experiment, but likely to remain an experiment for the foreseeable future.

And, yes, for C-style multidimensional arrays, a Proxy handler must return a Proxy, which just compounds the problem. The more obvious approach would be to implement a slice syntax, but then you force string parsing for each element you access. In short, if performance is even remotely a concern, you will stick with the .get() method. If performance is not a concern (e.g., in a REPL environment), then using Proxy may be viable.

But what I can say is that in no shape or form will Proxy support be added to this package. If you want to do so, create a new package which wraps this one and hack a away.

from ndarray.

No problem! And thank y'all both for following up so quickly!

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Neat idea! I think the main caveat would be speed. I know @kgryte has benchmarked this recently and found proxies slow all property access (I think all. correct me if I'm wrong. this is a major distinction) down by about a factor of 15x, which is a bit prohibitive. Plus, to get multidimensional nesting, you'd need to allocate (or cache?) and then index those objects, which would no less than multiply the overhead by the number of dimensions. The numpy way is to vectorize everything and if single-element accessors are slow it's because you should've vectorized anyway. But then you get elaborate projects that compile python to c or do jit stuff, all to get around slow interpreted loops. It seems like a bit of a shame to go down that path, though I agree it would be otherwise pretty outstanding.

You might be interested in @kgryte's work on stdlib-js since he's really working hard on exploring and analyzing all of these possibilities and producing scientific-grade numerical software for js, both client-side and with wasm/native support. Here's the ndarray constructor docs, for example.

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I don't want you to think the suggestion isn't very much appreciated, @rajsite, but for now I'll close this since @kgryte is correct that this repo simply isn't the correct place for a different ndarray front-end. Don't hesitate to follow up though! Glad to discuss further.

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@rajsite If you are interested in benchmarks, you can run them locally, provided you have setup and configured a development environment. The requisite file containing the benchmarks can be found here. Eventually, these benchmarks will be accessible through the stdlib project website, once we regenerate the docs, and you'll be able to run them in your browser. In the meantime, to get hard data, the project development environment is the best means. Should you pursue to run them, don't hesitate to ping us on the stdlib Gitter channel, if you have questions.

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