This is an alpha release of foreign-numeric-vector, a package of functions and accessors for working with numeric vectors stored in the foreign (non-Lisp) heap. The hope is that this package will be useful for implementing foreign function interfaces to foreign libraries (e.g. BLAS, LAPACK, FFTW). It is especially useful for wrapping libraries portably across CL implementations which vary in their choices of boxing or unboxing of individual elements of native arrays, and which may or may not offer the ability to protect an array from being moved by the CL garbage collector. foreign-numeric-vector requires CFFI and ITERATE. The dependence on CFFI is fundamental. The dependence on ITERATE could be removed fairly easily. I had originally thought that a good approach would be to use iterate to integrate the foreign-numeric-vectors with other sequences. Currently, it is not clear to me that ITERATE makes it sufficiently easy to generate sufficiently efficient code; this is something I need to investigate further. There is no real documentation, but usage is fairly straightforward. Basic usage (showing a couple different modes of access, and using some included utilities) looks something like: (defun double-float-readme-example (length) (let ((fnv (make-fnv-double length))) (fixtimes (i length) (setf (fnv-double-ref fnv i) (random 1.0d0))) (let ((sum 0.0d0)) (declare (type double-float sum)) (over-fnv-double (v) fnv (dfinc sum v)) (format t "Sum of array is ~A~%" sum)) (sort-fnv-double-<! fnv) (format t "The smallest few entries: ~A~%" fnv) (sort-fnv-double->! fnv) (format t "The largest few entries: ~A~%" fnv) )) See the file examples.lisp for some basic examples, discussion of efficient choices, and some benchmarks to run. Substantial effort has been made to make foreign-numeric-vector efficient. We make great use of type declarations and compiler macros to promote inlining. We are of course reliant on the underlying compilers and foreign function interfaces, and on CFFI. For instance, on SBCL, it is much faster to use mem-ref rather than mem-aref, making our own guarantees that the index to byte conversion involves only fixnums. More testing is required, but preliminary testing on SBCL indicates that for double-float operations, we are competitive with native array accesses in all cases. For complex double-floats, writing the complex number #C(1.0d0 1.0d0) to a foreign-numeric-vector is about twice as slow as writing it to a native array, but adding up a bunch of complex numbers is about the same speed. Sorting is quite efficient, because the comparison functions are required at compile time and get inlined. We use a template style architecture and macro-generating-macros to make the operations on different types. The code is released under the BSD license without the advertising clause (see LICENSE). As of 04 November 2006, this code is available at http://middleangle.com/rif/software/fnv-alpha-2.tar.gz All comments, suggestions, performance reports, and assistance should be sent to rif rif@mit.edu ;;;; Continuation Additional maintainance by AJ Rossini <blindglobe@gmail.com>, distributed via github (http://github.com/blindglobe/fnv.git) (FIXME: VERIFY URL!).
blindglobe/fnv
Foreign-Numeric-Vector, a common lisp package supporting the use of foreign-stored arrays in common lisp for numerical work.
Common LispBSD-3-Clause