Re: [eigen] restarting

[Benoît Jacob <jacob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Ben,

On Sunday 02 September 2007 21:38:14 Schleimer, Ben wrote:
>    Congrats on the decision to restart eigen2. Sounds like a good direction
> to take. You might want to consider building unit tests for the framework
> before you write the code because then the framework will be much easier to
> debug.

Thanks. I'll for sure write unit-tests simultaneously with the library code.
The new eigen2 is progressing quicker than I expected. For now the "library" 
does only matrix-matrix product, as this is a good starting point for 
expression templates. I'll commit to /branches/work/eigen2 as soon as I have 
got the basics right.

Already two things are nice:
1) reusing the CRTP trick from Eigen 1, I treat on an equal footing both 
fixed-size and dynamic-size (dense) matrices. The expression templates don't 
need to be written twice. (TVMET did only fixed-size). Only sparse matrices 
won't be able to share these expression templates. For these I'll either 
write special ETs or go for copy-on-write instead (still not sure). 
2) My expression templates should be able to represent lvalues. For example, 
I'm confident that Eigen 2 will allow magic things like:
matrix.row(i) += matrix.row(j)
to operate directly on rows and columns, without any overhead. TVMET didn't 
allow that.

> What was the complexity that TVMET added which eigen2 doesn't need?

* Automatic type promotion. Eigen1 didn't do it and nobody complained about 
that. Moreover it adds an overhead when it occurs (casting between types).
* Ability to apply standard math functions to every coeff of a matrix/vector. 
This had to be defined for every math function, so it generated a lot of code 
and caused compatibility issues.
* Ability to apply STL algorithms to a matrix/vector.
* Meta-code determining at compile-time whether or not to unroll loops using 
metaprograms, based on the size of objects (we'll always unroll for 
fixed-size objects, as anyway they're intended for small sizes only. Still 
not sure whether we need meta unrolling, as in Eigen 1 we did quite well 
without that).
* Utility code like a timer for benchmarking. Was out of place here.
* Lots of #ifdef making platform checks at compile-time (they are better done 
at install-time by CMake) and sometimes testing for trivial things (like 
avaibility of std::complex<T>).
* and lots more....

Cheers,
Benoit


>
> Cheers
> Ben

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