Cython

Perhaps you come from a c++ programming background and you still have this nagging feeling in the back of your head about Python being interpreted, and how that could mess up speed performance of your code. Never fear, Cython to the rescue.

Cython is an optimizing static compiler for the Python programming language. It gives you the combined power of Python and C.

Cython is a superset of the python language that supports calling C functions and declaring C data types on variables and class attributes. The benefit of these added features is that it allows the compiler to generate very efficient C code from Cython code. You generate C code once, and then compile it with the C compiler of your choice.

So, Cython makes it easy to wrap external C libraries in a form so that you can then use them in a Python program. Conversely, you could embed CPython code into an existing C application i believe, which is eye opening. And of course you can use it to speed up your Python code if you need it to run faster.

Check out the Cython Documentation Wiki.

Everyone's old favorite fallback, a Mandelbrot fractal generator code example is there to take for a test drive.

As an aside, MIT Media Lab professor and later Director Walter Bender once told me he punished any of his students he caught playing with Mandelbrot fractal code. Imagine that. I guess they better not try out the Cython examples.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

CycleGAN: a GAN architecture for learning unpaired image to image transformations

Image
 Like the Doublemint Twins touting the joys of Doublemint gum, 2 GANs are surely better than 1 GAN.  Especially if we package them together inside of one meta GAN module.  And this is exactly what the CycleGAN architecture does. Have you ever harbored dark secrets of turning a horse into a zebra?  The CycleGAN was developed to do just that. Learn how to turn a horse into a zebra.  And more. Now right away you can notice a difference between the image to image transformation GAN architectures we've been discussing over the last few posts.  Those last few posts described systems that learn from a database of matched input-output image pairs. And if your goal is to turn an edge representation into a nicely filled in continuous tone image, it's easy to build your database of matched input-output image pairs that your GAN system can then learn off of.  Take a continuous tone image (which will be the output of the database pair entry), then run it through an edge detector algorithm. 
Read more

Pix2Pix: a GAN architecture for image to image transformation

Image
 I thought following up yesterday's TraVelGAN post with a Pix2Pix GAN post would be useful to compare what is going on in the 2 architectures.  Two different approaches to the same problem. I stole this Pix2Pix Overview slide below from an excellent deeplearning.ai GAN course (note that they borrowed it from the original paper) because it gives you a good feel for what is going on inside of the Pix2Pix architecture.    Note how the Generator part is very much like an auto-encoder architecture, but rebuilt using the U-Net architecture features (based on skip-connections) that fastai has been discussing in their courses for several years before it became more widely known to the deep learning community at large  (and which originally came from an obscure medical image segmentation paper) . So the Generator in this Pix2Pix GAN is really pretty sophisticated, consisting of a whole image to image auto-encoder network with U-Net skip connections to generate better image quality at highe
Read more

Smart Fabrics

Image
"What makes smart fabrics revolutionary is that they have the ability to do many things that traditional fabrics cannot, including communicate, transform, conduct energy and even grow."  This is a quote from Rebeccah Pailes-Friedman, who is a professor at Pratt with a research focus on developing wearable technology and smart textiles. Enhancing textiles can be viewed through different lens.  Enhancements can be aesthetic, or performance boosting, or durability boosting. 
Read more