Metadata-Version: 1.0
Name: arrayfrombuffer
Version: 2
Summary: Creates Numeric arrays from buffer objects (such as mmap)
Home-page: http://pobox.com/~kragen/sw/arrayfrombuffer/
Author: Kragen Sitaker
Author-email: kragen@pobox.com
License: BSD without the advertising clause
Description: The 'arrayfrombuffer' package features support for Numeric Python
        arrays whose contents are stored in buffer objects, including
        memory-mapped files.  This has the following advantages:
        
        - loading your array from a file is easy --- a module import and a
        single function call --- and doesn't use excessive amounts of
        memory.
        - loading your array is quick; it doesn't need to be copied from one
        part of memory to another in order to be loaded.
        - your array gets demand-loaded; parts you aren't using don't need to
        be in memory or in swap.
        - under memory-pressure conditions, your array doesn't use up swap,
        and parts of it you haven't modified can be evicted from RAM without
        the need for a disk write
        - your arrays can be bigger than your physical memory, up to the
        limitations imposed by your virtual memory address space and your
        OS; admittedly, this used to be a bigger deal when our PCs had 64
        mebibytes of RAM, 2 gibibytes of address space, and 4 gibibytes of
        disk space.  But on my laptop, which has 128 MiB of RAM and 256 MiB
        of swap, I added two 512-mebibyte arrays to produce a third one with
        the statement "Numeric.add(a, b, c)."  It took eleven minutes,
        though.
        - when you modify your array, only the parts you modify get written
        back out to disk
        
        In theory, you could also use this package for things like arrays in
        memory shared between programs or arrays in distributed shared memory.
        I haven't tried using it for those things, though.
        
        Someone built a package called "Vmaps" that does something similar:
        http://snafu.freedom.org/Vmaps/.  It was released 2002-01-22.
        
Platform: Python
