>> I have considered using ctypes but for my needs using the C API >> directly seems more reasonable. array.array and numpy.array doesn't >> fit my needs since I need to do long and complicated operations on the >> two (pretty large) integer arrays that would be too slow using >> array.array and numpy.array (I've verified this claim by benchmarking >> a numpy.array based solution). > > OK, but if you go to array.array or numpy.array or ctypes, you can > create a uniformly typed (C datatype) array , which is the key to > getting any speed out of the deal. If you insist on using python > lists, you are stuck with extracting data element by element from > its Python language wrap.
I thought that going through the python C API will be more cross-platform than using ctypes, but I might be wrong. Anyway, the C API for such a simple thing as a single function doesn't seem too scary :) I agree that array.array is more efficient than a list but the input for my function will come from PIL and PIL returns a list. So I have a list to begin with which will be passed to the C function. I assume converting the list to an array.array and passing that to the C function doesn't make any difference in terms of speed since the operation itself will be done in the C function anyway. Cheers, Daniel -- Psss, psss, put it down! - http://www.cafepress.com/putitdown -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
