on 11.08.2009 at 14:54 Edward Grace wrote :
In principle yes - however the efficient implementation of the above is likely to be a lot tricker than it might seem. will you as a user concern about how tricky an implementation is? or will you rather care about how convinient and clear public interface is?
The 'advantage' of BLAS and other routines as I see it is many many man-years of optimisation and tweaking on various architectures as well as good generic implementations (ATLAS). I'd venture that it's still going to be hard to beat! the advantage of BLAS as far as i can see is if you take original fortran implementation and use it as it is (wow, how many 'as's and 'is's) as i understand that's the implementation you are talking about when mentioning 'man-years' i hope to make an implementation 'as good as' but which will exploit all of c++ advantages
I am slightly unsure, is your proposal a rewrite of the linear algebra routines or a wrapper that conceptually maps calls in the following manner? yourlib::operator*(foo,bar) -> ublas::prod(foo,bar) definitely it's not a wrapper so i guess it's a rewrite in c++ style
Are you aware of Blitz++ and POOMA? Blitz offers a very (for the mathematical physicist) intuitive tensor- like approach, an example: // This expression will set // // c = a * b // ijk ik kj C = A(i,k) * B(k,j); i'm aware of blitz++ (i peeped at the implementation a little when i wrote my own lib) i don't use it because i don't like the concept
-- Pavel