Slow iteration because of `IxDyn`

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
rust
Domain
performance

Research direction

Start by reproducing the iter() and to_owned() comparisons shown for IxDyn and fixed-size ArrayView values, then trace their respective iteration paths. Compare the results with issue #1339; done means a measured improvement for dynamic-dimensional arrays while preserving the existing behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

As I described in https://github.com/rust-ndarray/ndarray/issues/1339, an array with IxDyn has 10x slower iteration performance than an equivalent array using a fixed-size index. This has wide-reaching implications, as this means that many pixel-wise operations are substantially slower.

Example:
Let n be an ndarray with the shape (4320, 8468, 4).

let n: ArrayViewD<f32>; // uses IxDyn 

// iter()

// slow: takes 3sec on my machine
let _: Vec<f32> = n.iter().cloned().collect();

// fast: takes 0.4sec on my machine
let n3: ArrayView3<f32> = n.into_dimensionality().unwrap();
let _: Vec<f32> = n3.iter().cloned().collect();

// to_owned()

// slow: takes 0.95sec on my machine
let _ = n.to_owned();

// fast: takes 0.25sec on my machine
let n3: ArrayView3<f32> = n.into_dimensionality().unwrap();
let _ = n3.to_owned();

To improve the performance of arrays using IxDyn, I suggest optimizing iteration for these arrays. Since we can see that using fixed-sized indexes is substantially faster, I suggest internally "casting" the array to a fixed-size index (or similar) before iteration when possible.

Dominant language
Rust
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