On Wednesday, 14 March 2018 at 17:36:18 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
On Wednesday, 14 March 2018 at 17:22:16 UTC, Sam Potter wrote:
Ideally data structures and algorithms covering this would be
in the standard library?
I sure hope not. At least not for a long time anyway. It would
be hard to make any progress if it were in the standard
library. At this stage functionality is more important than
having a tiny amount of code that is written perfectly and has
satisfied the 824 rules necessary to get into Phobos.
Sure. The key word in my statement was "ideally". :-)
For what it's worth, there is already an "informal spec" in the
form of the high-level interface for numerical linear algebra and
sci. comp. that has been developed (over three decades?) in
MATLAB. This spec has been replicated (more or less) in Julia,
Python, Octave, Armadillo/Eigen, and others. I'm not aware of all
the subtleties involved in incorporating it into any standard
library, let alone D's, but maybe this is an interesting place
where D could get an edge over other competing languages.
Considering that people in Python land have picked up D as a
"faster Python", there might be more traction here than is
readily apparent. Just some thoughts---I'm very biased. The
reality is that these algorithms are equally (if not more)
important in their domain than the usual "CS undergrad
algorithms". It's easy enough to use a library, but again, "high
torque" would seem to point to making it easier.
This comment is coming from someone who has been sitting by
the edge of the pool, waiting to hop in and check out D as a
replacement for a combination of C++/Python/Julia/MATLAB for
research in scientific computing. Take all this with a grain
of salt since I haven't contributed anything to the D
community. :^)
What has been holding you back from using D? I've experienced
no difficulties, but maybe I've been lucky.
Hard to say. Right now I write numeric C libraries using C++ "as
a backend". I've used D for some very small projects, and my
feeling is that I'm using C++ as a worse D. I lean heavily on
C++'s templates and metaprogramming abilities, and it looks like
I could do what I do now in C++ more easily in D, and could do
many more things besides. I think what's holding me back now is a
combination of my own inertia (I have to get things done!) and
possibly a degree of perceived "instability" (it's totally
unclear to me how valid this perception is). I haven't tried
"BetterC" yet, but once I have some downtime, I'm going to give
it a whirl and see how easily it hooks up with my target
languages. If it's a nice experience, I would very much like to
try a larger project.
