DIP80: phobos additions

[via Digitalmars-d]

On Sunday, 14 June 2015 at 11:43:46 UTC, Ilya Yaroshenko wrote:
> I am really don't understand what you mean with "generic" 
> keyword.
>
> Do you want one matrix type that includes all cases???
> I hope you does not.

Yes, that is what generic programming is about. The type should 
signify the semantics, not exact representation.

Then you alias common types "float4x4" etc.

It does take a lot of abstraction design work. I've done some of 
it in C++ for sliced views over memory and arrays and I'd say you 
need many iterations to get it right.

> If not, yes it should be generic like all other Phobos. But we 
> will have one module for 3D/4D geometric and 3D/4D 
> matrix/vector multiplications, another module for general 
> matrix (std.container.matrix) and another module with generic 
> BLAS (std.numeric.blas) for general purpose matrixes. After all 
> of that we can think about scripting like "m0 = m1*v*m2" 
> features.

All I can say is that  I have a strong incentive to avoid using 
Phobos features if D does not automatically utilize the best 
OS/CPU vendor provided libraries in a portable manner and with 
easy-to-read high level abstractions.

D's strength compared to C++/Rust is that D can evolve to be 
easier to use than those languages. C++/Rust are hard to use by 
nature. But usability takes a lot of API design effort, so it 
won't come easy.

D's strength compared to Go is that it can better take advantage 
of hardware and provide better library abstractions, Go appears 
to deliberately avoid it. They probably want to stay nimble with 
very limited hardware-interfacing so that you can easily move it 
around in the cloud.