NumPy style arrays for C++? [closed]

Question

Are there any C++ (or C) libs that have NumPy-like arrays with support for slicing, vectorized operations, adding and subtracting contents element-by-element, etc.?

Answer 1

Here are several free software that may suit your needs.

1. The GNU Scientific Library is a GPL software written in C. Thus, it has a C-like allocation and way of programming (pointers, etc.). With the GSLwrap, you can have a C++ way of programming, while still using the GSL. GSL has a BLAS implementation, but you can use ATLAS instead of the default CBLAS, if you want even more performances.

2. The boost/uBLAS library is a BSL library, written in C++ and distributed as a boost package. It is a C++-way of implementing the BLAS standard. uBLAS comes with a few linear algebra functions, and there is an experimental binding to ATLAS.

3. eigen is a linear algebra library written in C++, distributed under the MPL2 license (starting from version 3.1.1) or LGPL3/GPL2 (older versions). It's a C++ way of programming, but more integrated than the two others (more algorithms and data structures are available). Eigen claims to be faster than the BLAS implementations above, while not following the de-facto standard BLAS API. Eigen does not seem to put a lot of effort on parallel implementation.

4. Armadillo is LGPL3 library for C++. It has binding for LAPACK (the library used by numpy). It uses recursive templates and template meta-programming, which is a good point (I don't know if other libraries are doing it also?).

5. xtensor is a C++ library that is BSD licensed. It offers A C++ API very similar to that of NumPy. See https://xtensor.readthedocs.io/en/latest/numpy.html for a cheat sheet.

These alternatives are really good if you just want to get data structures and basic linear algebra. Depending on your taste about style, license or sysadmin challenges (installing big libraries like LAPACK may be difficult), you may choose the one that best suits your needs.

Answer 2

Try out xtensor. (See the NumPy to Xtensor Cheat Sheet).

xtensor is a C++ library meant for numerical analysis with multi-dimensional array expressions.

xtensor provides

• an extensible expression system enabling numpy-style broadcasting.
• an API following the idioms of the C++ standard library.
• tools to manipulate array expressions and build upon xtensor.

Example

Initialize a 2-D array and compute the sum of one of its rows and a 1-D array.

#include <iostream>
#include "xtensor/xarray.hpp"
#include "xtensor/xio.hpp"

xt::xarray<double> arr1
  {{1.0, 2.0, 3.0},
   {2.0, 5.0, 7.0},
   {2.0, 5.0, 7.0}};

xt::xarray<double> arr2
  {5.0, 6.0, 7.0};

xt::xarray<double> res = xt::view(arr1, 1) + arr2;

std::cout << res;

Outputs

{7, 11, 14}

Initialize a 1-D array and reshape it inplace.

#include <iostream>
#include "xtensor/xarray.hpp"
#include "xtensor/xio.hpp"

xt::xarray<int> arr
  {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9};

arr.reshape({3, 3});

std::cout << arr;

Outputs

{{1, 2, 3},
 {4, 5, 6},
 {7, 8, 9}}

Answer 3

DyND is designed to be, among other things, a NumPy-like library for C++. Things like broadcasting, arithmetic operators, and slicing all work fine. On the other hand, it is still very experimental and many features haven't been implemented yet.

Here's a simple implementation of the de Casteljau algorithm in C++ using DyND arrays:

#include <iostream>
#include <dynd/array.hpp>

using namespace dynd;

nd::array decasteljau(nd::array a, double t){
    size_t e = a.get_dim_size();
    for(size_t i=0; i < e-1; i++){
        a = (1.-t) * a(irange()<(e-i-1)) + t * a(0<irange());
    }
    return a;
}

int main(){
    nd::array a = {1., 2., 2., -1.};
    std::cout << decasteljau(a, .25) << std::endl;
}

I wrote a blog post a little while back with more examples and side-by-side comparisons of the syntax for Fortran 90, DyND in C++, and NumPy in Python.

Disclaimer: I'm one of the current DyND developers.

Answer 4

Use LibTorch (PyTorch frontend for C++) and be happy.

Answer 5

This is an old question. Still felt like answering. Thought might help many, Especially pydevs coding in C++.

If you have already worked with python numpy, then NumCpp is a great choice. It's minimalistic in syntax and has got similar functions or methods as py numpy.

The comparison part in the readme doc is also very very cool.

NumCpp

nc::NdArray<int> arr = {{4, 2}, {9, 4}, {5, 6}};
arr.reshape(5, 3);
arr.astype<double>();