Re-introduce support for complex numbers

since !292 (merged) complex numbers are not supported anymore, which is a feature I'm dependent on.

You will probably want to switch from pystencils.fields('x, y: complex64') to pystencils.fields('x, y: float32[2d]') and implement your own helper functions for complex arithmetic (exp, arg, abs, real, imag, ...). I guess the downside of the old implementation (!72 (merged)) was that it just mapped to the C99 complex data type. That means you were forced to use zyxf layout and you did not gain anything because no modern hardware architecture has native complex number instructions.

I would say the suggestion of @kuron will be the simplest way to do it. Overall we removed it because it was rather hacky and non-compliant with the rest of pystencils.

Is the suggestion of @kuron somewhat satisfying for you or would it be urgent to re-introduce complex numbers?

What is the status of this Issue @alexander.reinauer ? Should it remain open or is the work-around good enough?

I've created a work-around a while back. I'm kind of forced to use the numpy.complex128 datatype for the arrays, because of another library, but I created and reshaped a view of these arrays with dtype=numpy.float64 and implemented the complex-number arithmetics I need myself, as @kuron suggested. Not an elegant solution and relying on the allocation in numpy, but it works. For me it's good enough for the moment, so feel free to close if it's not worth the effort to support.

Ok then I will close it for now

closed