2014-06-08 8:56 GMT-04:00 <fb.01...@gmail.com>: > On Monday, June 2, 2014 12:11:29 AM UTC+2, Benoit Jacob wrote: > > My ROI for arguing on standards mailing on matrix math topics lists has > > been very low, presumably because these are specialist topics outside of > > the area of expertise of these groups. > > > > Here are a couple more objections by the way: > > > > [...] > > > > Benoit > > Benoit, would you mind producing a strawman for ES7, or advising someone > who can? Brendan Eich is doing some type stuff which is probably relevant > to this (also for SIMD etc.). I firmly believe proper Matrix handling & > APIs for JS are wanted by quite a few people. DOMMatrix-using APIs may then > be altered to accept JS matrices (or provide a way to translate from > JSMatrix to DOMMatrix and back again). This may help in the long term while > the platform can have the proposed APIs. Thanks! > > Don't put matrix arithmetic concepts directly in a generalist language like JS, or in its standard library. That's too much of a specialist topic and with too many compromises to decide on.
Instead, at the language level, simply make sure that the language offers the right features to allow third parties to build good matrix classes on top of it. For example, C++'s templates, OO concepts, alignment/SIMD extensions, etc, make it a decent language to implement matrix libraries on top of, and as a result, C++ programmers are much better serve by the offering of independent matrix libraries, than they would be by a standard library attempt at matrix library design. Another example is Fortran, which IIRC has specific features enabling fast array arithmetic, but lets the actual matrix arithmetic up to 3rd-party libraries (BLAS, LAPACK). I think that all the history shows that leaving matrix arithmetic up to 3rd parties is best, but there are definitely language-level issues to discuss to enable 3rd parties to do that well. Benoit > _______________________________________________ > dev-platform mailing list > dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform > _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
