Dear ATSites,
First, impressed by the power of ATS which unfortunately for me is still
inaccessible even after spending the typical time I spend overviewing other
languages. For sure, I've listened to many people saying how hard it was,
so that didn't help ;-) Maybe they want to keep ATS for themselves and
frighten away potential new users ?
I'm a physicist, cosmologist, currently working on setting up a project
involving image reconstruction, around what the Chebfun matlab toolbox
implements. Now, I've been looking at Dex, he new google research language,
because that's typically what I need,for exactly the same reason the
designers made Dex (escape Matlab and go for more than its clone on juice,
Julia) but it looks very experimental and doesn't really have all I need,
especially interfacing with C.
So first, would I be able to massage ATS into allowing some nice syntax, I
mean can I code a library (using whatever tools I totally don't understand
today) that would allow me to write
`for i,j: C.i.j = A.i.k * B.k.j`
In a very similar way to Dex (who has ranged integer type for the indices),
i.e. which would be interpreted as :
```
for i in rows range of A:
for j in colums range of B:
for k in cols of A == rows of B:
C[i,j] = A[i,k] * B[k,j]
```
or whatever equivalent in ATS.
You will notice that it loops implicitly on k (Einstein summation), thus
without me specifying k, and all the indices getting checked like in Dex at
compile time, with inference wherever needed. This means I want to be able
to write M.2.3 = 25 (meaning M[2,3]=5) without casting overhead like in Dex
(they have to cast from integers to ranged ordinals if I remember).
I would also need support for 128 bit integers and all for cryptographic
uses, the possibility of defining
foo(m `Matrix[12 rows, any u32 in [0,23] columns, any float type for the
elements, unknown variance]`)
and then call foo with `foo(b)` and b is checked to fit the type declared
for foo's arguments, so it wold tell me if I try to put in a matrix with
too many rows, but accept a matrix with 12 rows and 21 columns filled with
f32, the possibility of defining a set of accepted types, including
constants, and check if what I use belongs to that set, abstractions like
OO to better contain the math abstractions we manipulate.
Also, the possibility to implement the right structures for SIMD and all
that, SOA, etc. This organizing my memory as I want, perhaps not from the
start, but as the project progresses.
The possibility of multicores, and distributed computing.
Proving that some functions are right.
And last but not least, how much will I have to [un|re]learn when ATS3 is
released ?
And maybe other questions will follow if the above receives positive
answers...
By the way, why no Discord channel ? It's so helpful for a community.
It's a big pile of questions, I just want to know if learning ATS could
make those features possible. My other path is to go to Rust and hope I can
massage the macros to handle my syntax, but Rust doesn't have true range
types for the tensor indices I want to use, although some crate imitates
them, and ATS looks much more powerful to me.
That's it, I hope ATS can do all that.
Best,
Yann
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