Thursday, December 8, 2011

Plotting using matplotlib from PyPy

Big fat warning This is just a proof of concept. It barely works. There are missing pieces left and right, which were replaced with hacks so I can get this to run and prove it's possible. Don't try this at home, especially your home. You have been warned.

There has been a lot of talking about PyPy not integrating well with the current scientific Python ecosystem, and numpypy (a NumPy reimplementation on top of pypy) was dubbed "a fancy array library". I'm going to show that integration with this ecosystem is possible with our design.

First, the demo:

#!/usr/bin/env pypy

# numpy, pypy version
import numpypy as numpy
# DRAGONS LIVE THERE (fortunately hidden)
from embed.emb import import_mod

pylab = import_mod('matplotlib.pylab')

if __name__ == '__main__':
    a = numpy.arange(100, dtype=int)
    b = numpy.sin(a)
    pylab.plot(a, b)
    pylab.show()

And you get:

Now, how to reproduce it:

  • You need a PyPy without cpyext, I did not find a linker that would support overriding symbols. Right now there are no nightlies like this, so you have to compile it yourself, like:

    ./translate.py -Ojit targetpypystandalone.py --withoutmod-cpyext
    

    That would give you a PyPy that's unable to load some libraries like PIL, but perfectly working otherwise.

  • Speaking of which, you need a reasonably recent PyPy.

  • The approach is generally portable, however the implementation has been tested only on 64bit linux. Few tweaks might be required.

  • You need to install python2.6, the python2.6 development headers, and have numpy and matplotlib installed on that python.

  • You need a checkout of my hacks directory and put embedded on your PYTHONPATH, your pypy checkout also has to be on the PYTHONPATH.

Er wait, what happened?

What didn't happen is we did not reimplement matplotlib on top of PyPy. What did happen is we embed CPython inside of PyPy using ctypes. We instantiate it. and follow the embedding tutorial for CPython. Since numpy arrays are not movable, we're able to pass around an integer that's represents the memory address of the array data and reconstruct it in the embedded interpreter. Hence with a relatively little effort we managed to reuse the same array data on both sides to plot at array. Easy, no?

This approach can be extended to support anything that's not too tied with python objects. SciPy and matplotlib both fall into the same category but probably the same strategy can be applied to anything, like GTK or QT. It's just a matter of extending a hack into a working library.

To summarize, while we're busy making numpypy better and faster, it seems that all external libraries on the C side can be done using an embedded Python interpreter with relatively little effort. To get to that point, I spent a day and a half to learn how to embed CPython, with very little prior experience in the CPython APIs. Of course you should still keep as much as possible in PyPy to make it nice and fast :)

Cheers, fijal

8 comments:

  1. Two thumbs up! This is quite exciting! Looking forward to further followup from this.

    How does Scipy look in terms of implementation, e.g. wrapping fortran code with f2py? Could it become achieved?

    ReplyDelete
  2. PyPy Version is showing best result, it is giving extra protection to program.

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  3. Good work. Is this approach your long term plan for supporting scientific python libraries or just a stop-gap solution until "proper" support can be added to pypy (or to the library)?

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  4. @dac this can scale to the entire matplotlib/scipy fully. Whether scientific community people will take up a gargantuan task of moving SciPy/matplotlib out of using CPython C API is beyond my knowledge, but even if it'll happen, it won't happen in short-to-mid-term.

    So overall I think it's a good midterm solution, that might just stay forever.

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  5. Another solution containing dragons, that someone might find useful:
    1) create new python file, that would print diagrams
    2) send data from main program running in pypy to the second python file using call from subprocess
    eg. call(["python", "pythondiagrams.py", "-data", str(my_data).replace(" ", ";")]), data should be be text type and contain separator other than space
    3) parse input data using argparse and convert them using ast

    ReplyDelete
  6. Also, seems that embed must live below the root of pypy source tree (else it fails to create proper paths to ".o" output files in rpython.translator.platform.Platform._make_o_file).

    ReplyDelete

See also PyPy's IRC channel: #pypy at freenode.net, or the pypy-dev mailing list.
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