On Friday, 14 August 2015 at 18:51:51 UTC, David Nadlinger wrote:
If anything I think small vectors, non-sparse matrixes and
rectangles/AABB could be part of Phobos before that.
If you just had a go at it from the CG/gamedev perspective,
you'd probably end up with an API that is entirely unsuitable
for larger problems. This might not be a big issue (just have
two separate APIs), but we'd need to make it a conscious
decision.
While I'm interested in working with big (500,000+) dense (and
sometimes smaller sparse) rectangular matrices, my sense of the D
forum is that there are more CG/gamedev people using D.
Nevertheless, I think it is important to get the general
structure right in a way that can be specialized to work with
small matrices, rectangular matrices, strided matrices, or sparse
matrices. I don't see an issue with prioritizing what users want
in terms of fleshing out the APIs, so long as the different ways
people use matrix libraries is in the back of the designers minds
when they design it.
I was looking over some of the OpenGL matrix libraries recently.
They have types like mat4 or vec3. I couldn't help but think that
template constraints (at least for static arrays) would probably
make it much easier. For instance, if you have a function that
takes a vec, you can specialize it to do different things
depending on if the array is small or large (small, unroll loops,
large use parallelism, maybe with the decision on when stop
unrolling loops or starting to use parallelism determined by
AEOS, as in ATLAS).
