Return struct sequence objects instead of plain tuples #13
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enhancement
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The CPython C API has a concept of "struct sequence objects", which provides the C-API equivalent of
namedtuplein Python. Some functions in riptide_cpp return tuples, and I think most of these are reasonable straightforward -- e.g. a function returning a tuple of two arrays. In a few cases though, the returned data is sufficiently complex / nested and users are often unsure how to consume the data. The most notable example of this is thert.sds_info()function in riptable, which returns a fairly complex nested structure of tuples, dictionaries, and arrays; we could define somenamedtupletypes in the riptable Python code rather than making this change, but I experimented with it once and found it would require translating the data from plain tuples to the namedtuples, which would have non-trivial performance overhead.For these complex cases, we could define a few of these "struct sequence" types (which would show up as a
namedtuple-derived type in Python) to provide names for the tuple fields -- and perhaps a short description in a docstring -- and return instances of these types instead of plain tuples. This shouldn't require much work in riptide_cpp beyond defining the types in the module setup code, and I don't think there should be any changes needed from the Python side (because it's already operating on tuples, and after the change we'd still be returning instances of a tuple-derived type).The
PyStructSequence_NewType()function was apparently broken prior to Python 3.8, so we'd probably need to use thePyStructSequence_InitType2()function instead (the former is a convenience wrapper for the latter).The text was updated successfully, but these errors were encountered: