SoA or AoS?

[Helveg]

What do you think is computationally most efficient inside of Blender? A structure of arrays (x_vector, y_vector, z_vector, radius_vector) or an array of structures [point1, point2, point3]?

In the new API this information is only ever used once in principle to iterate over and "extrude" the CurveContainer. Once the Blender object for a Cell is constructed we throw away the data that constructed it to reduce memory and in the (I think rare) case that someone wants to read something about the cell they just constructed I'd like to read that out of the Blender object.

For these purposes, SoA or AoS?

[Helveg]

Since I'd like to keep this a minimal effort endeavour and prevent "premature optimization" I'm mostly in favor of keeping the current description, the coords, unless problems arise or were already known to you?

Could you tell me though where the logic is that parses the coords from the RPC into the coords that are used in the CurveContainer, they seem to be different in nature, the latter being numpy-like?

[JustasB]

So the SoA format was chosen because that's the format used by the optimized Blender foreach_set method when setting the coordinates of the bezier curves.

Take a look at this method, I think this will answer your 2nd question:

BlenderNEURON/blenderneuron/blender/views/curvecontainer.py

Line 108 in 7297e6a

def add_spline(self, coords, radii, smooth):

BTW, the sections are constructed by creating a Bezier curve object in Blender and then assigning radius to the 3D points:

[Helveg]

Ok!