Enable evaluation of multiple inputs at once on a single polynomial

[KPJoshi]

At the moment, I have to evaluate the polynomial one at a time through this library. It is not possible to give multiple inputs at once through a 2D numpy array, and get multiple outputs in return.

Could this perhaps be more easily possible through the numba backend?

[jannikmi]

Thanks for suggesting this. I believe one can use numpy.vectorize for this. Feel free reopen this issue if that does not solve your use case.

[KPJoshi]

The documentation for the numpy.vectorize function says:

The vectorize function is provided primarily for convenience, not for performance. The implementation is essentially a for loop.

Which is what I'm already doing. Ideally, each operation within the polynomial evaluation code would be vectorized. Perhaps for this it would be good to output code for evaluating the horner polynomial in numpy.

[jannikmi]

Ok. Are you sure the evaluation on many points is really a bottleneck in your use case? On how many points are you evaluating a single polynomial at once?

Without thinking to much about it, I would say that there is not a lot of operations one can save by considering multiple query points at the same time. This means that there is probably not much more that an optimised for loop one can build.

If this would make a big difference in your case, please feel free to add the small extensions to the evaluation functions (C and Numba optimised) and raise a PR. Unfortunately I don't have the time at the moment to implement this, but I would definetly take some tome to help with documentation, tests, release, etc.