Functions returning specialized Eigen matrices like Eigen::DiagonalMatrix and
Eigen::SelfAdjointView--which inherit from EigenBase but not
DenseBase--isn't currently allowed; such classes are explicitly copyable
into a Matrix (by definition), and so we can support functions that
return them by copying the value into a Matrix then casting that
resulting dense Matrix into a numpy.ndarray. This commit does exactly
that.
Some Eigen objects, such as those returned by matrix.diagonal() and
matrix.block() have non-standard stride values because they are
basically just maps onto the underlying matrix without copying it (for
example, the primary diagonal of a 3x3 matrix is a vector-like object
with .src equal to the full matrix data, but with stride 4). Returning
such an object from a pybind11 method breaks, however, because pybind11
assumes vectors have stride 1, and that matrices have strides equal to
the number of rows/columns or 1 (depending on whether the matrix is
stored column-major or row-major).
This commit fixes the issue by making pybind11 use Eigen's stride
methods when copying the data.
Eigen::Ref is a common way to pass eigen dense types without needing a
template, e.g. the single definition `void
func(Eigen::Ref<Eigen::MatrixXd> x)` can be called with any double
matrix-like object.
The current pybind11 eigen support fails with internal errors if
attempting to bind a function with an Eigen::Ref<...> argument because
Eigen::Ref<...> satisfies the "is_eigen_dense" requirement, but can't
compile if actually used: Eigen::Ref<...> itself is not default
constructible, and so the argument std::tuple containing an
Eigen::Ref<...> isn't constructible, which results in compilation
failure.
This commit adds support for Eigen::Ref<...> by giving it its own
type_caster implementation which consists of an internal type_caster of
the referenced type, load/cast methods that dispatch to the internal
type_caster, and a unique_ptr to an Eigen::Ref<> instance that gets
set during load().
There is, of course, no performance advantage for pybind11-using code of
using Eigen::Ref<...>--we are allocating a matrix of the derived type
when loading it--but this has the advantage of allowing pybind11 to bind
transparently to C++ methods taking Eigen::Refs.
This allows (and changes the current examples) to exit with status 99 to
skip a test instead of outputting a special string ("NumPy missing").
This also fixes the eigen test, which currently fails when eigen
headers are available but NumPy is not, to skip instead of failing when
NumPy isn't available.
Passing a non-contiguous one-dimensional numpy array gives incorrect
results, so three of these tests fail. The only one passing is the
simple case where the numpy array is contiguous and we are building a
column-major vector. Subsequent commit will fix the three failing
cases.