ArrayViewsAPL

This package is for developing array views based on staged functions, a new technology in Julia 0.4. Compared to previous efforts, staged functions perform almost all the "work" at compile time, allowing the results of construction and indexing to reduce to a single-line expression.

Comparison to ArrayViews and SubArrays

This effort is complementary to Dahua Lin's excellent ArrayViews.jl. That package's great strength is making linear indexing efficient when the parent is an Array and when the view is contiguous. The purposes of this package are (1) to handle any AbstractArray, (2) to focus on making cartesian indexing efficient, and (3) to optionally support slicing (i.e., dropping dimensions indexed with a scalar).

Aside from the differences in applicability and design, both approaches are very efficient. Compared with ArrayViews, construction of the types here is even faster but linear indexing is not as fast. An ideal solution would probably be to combine Dahua's ContiguousView type (to be used when applicable) with the approach here.

In base Julia, SubArrays are more general than the types used in ArrayViews, but they have a number of well-known performance problems. In particular, their generality makes them very slow to construct. Moreover, SubArray indexing is delegated to linear indexing, which is bad if the parent array type doesn't support efficient linear indexing. In general, cartesian indexing can be made efficient for a wider variety of array types, which is why that approach is emphasized here.

Benefits of stagedfunctions

As an example of the benefits of staged functions, consider making 2d slices of a 3d array,

S1 = sliceview(A, :, 5, :)
S2 = sliceview(A, 5, :, :)

For cartesian indexing, the natural approach is to replace S1[i,j] with A[i,5,j] and S2[i,j] with A[5,i,j]. Doing so without any runtime overhead requires a method of getindex specialized for a View{T,2,typeof(A),(UnitRange{Int},Int,UnitRange{Int})} and a different one for a View{T,2,typeof(A),(Int,UnitRange{Int},UnitRange{Int})}. One could generate all these methods using loops, but supporting just Int, UnitRange, and StepRange up to dimension 8 would require 3^8 = 6561 pre-generated variants of getindex. In contrast, staged functions allow all of these to be generated on the fly for arbitrary dimensionality. This is quite desirable given that any given Julia session is likely to use just a very small fraction of these possible methods.

Status

If you're running a recent version of Julia master, this works.

Currently two types of view-creation are supported: subview and sliceview. subview duplicates Julia's current indexing rules (including dropping trailing dimensions of size 1), and sliceview is aimed at full APL support (currently it behaves analogously to Julia's slice). See also JuliaLang/julia#5949. Use them similarly to Julia's sub and slice.