I’d like to talk for a moment about the new buffer protocol support in the latest development version of Panda3D. It’s not a particularly exciting feature, but it can be an important one, especially if you use Panda3D together with other libraries like NumPy or if you need to do a lot of low-level operations on texture or geometry data from Python. However, most use cases will not require this functionality.
The Python buffer protocol is a way for Python applications to get a direct hook into C/C++ memory, arrays in particular. Panda3D classes that support it provide a pointer into the underlying memory to the Python interpreter along with a description of how the data is laid out in memory. This description is necessary for Python to know how to access and copy the information.
Starting with Python 2.6, you can use the built-in multiview type to access the memory underlying an object exposing the buffer interface. You can then manipulate the data by converting it to a list or array.array object, creating sub-views and operating on those, writing or reading parts of it to a file, or even just modifying the memory directly as if it were a regular Python list.
Right now, the only Panda3D classes that expose the buffer interface are GeomVertexArrayData and PointerToArray (the latter of which is used for most array storage purposes in Panda3D, including textures), but more classes can easily be added on request. Conversely, Panda allows taking an existing buffer object (such as from array.array or a NumPy array) as source data for a texture or a vertex data array.
When copying data to other libraries such as NumPy, this can help cut down on unnecessary copy operations. Presently, you would call a method like get_data() to create a C++ string, which is one copy operation already, which would then be wrapped into a Python string, which is another. Finally, you would pass this string to NumPy, which would perform at least one more copy operation to copy it into its own representation. But since NumPy also supports the buffer protocol, you can now copy the contents of a texture or of a vertex data array straight into a NumPy array without any unnecessary copy operations.
One other interesting use case for this feature is the fast and efficient manipulation of vertex data and texture data from Python. Instead of having to create a GeomVertexRewriter or a PNMImage to modify the respective data, you can now create a memoryview to iterate over the data directly, easily copy subsets around, or page them out to disk. In my own use case, which involved a lot of geometry generation and manipulation, this flexibility allowed me to dramatically decrease the time spent generating geometry and flattening it. Direct access to the memory also allowed me to quickly page chunks of geometry data out to disk and back into memory when necessary.
The buffer protocol provides a lot of the flexibility of low-level memory access without being exposed to all of the intricacies of C/C++ memory management. In particular, the data is reference counted, so you don’t need to worry about deleting the data. You should in fact be able to keep multiviews around for non-immediate consumption, but keep in mind that you may still need to tell Panda3D when you’ve modified the data later (for instance with an additional explicit call to modify_ram_image()).
This feature will be available in the 1.9.0 release of the Panda3D SDK.