Back in the game: Numerics in D

[Norbert Nemec]

Hi there,

just to say "Hi" to those that might still remember my name from the 
good ol' times. (I just checked - I actually sent 464 messages to this 
list from 2004 to 2006 and none since.)

To explain: Back in 2004, at the beginning of my PhD project in 
computational physics, I discovered D, spent lots of thought on it in my 
spare time and took part in many discussions, but D was not really 
usable for my actual PhD work, so I never had any serious application 
for it and soon had to cut down the time I spent on it. A little later, 
I met a nice girl, married her, finished my PhD, moved to UK and worked 
two years as a post doc coding mostly in Fortran and Python. Over these 
years, I observed D only from the distance, was amazed about the 
progress but never got into it more seriously.

Now, however -- probably inspired by the frustration over the Fortran 
code I have to work with -- I have picked up the ideas I started in 2004 
and have realized that it might actually be the time to turn these into 
a serious, full time research project:

I am currently considering to apply for an academic research fellowship 
that would allow me to work full time on the development of a numerical 
library for D. The core of this work would be the implementation of 
multi-dimensional numerical arrays and array expressions similar to what 
NumPy does in Python. It would remain to be seen how much can be done as 
a library and what should be done at a language level. Ultimately, I 
believe D could achive support for numerical programming with the 
comfort, simplicity and expressiveness of Python and the performance of 
Fortran.

My core ideas are still similar to what I described years ago:
     http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~nn245/documents/D-multidimarray.html
I was very honored to see that Oskar Linde has actually written a 
proof-of-concept library based on my description and have also seen the 
efforts that Bill Baxter has put into his similar library. Both will 
certainly be a valuable starting point for whatever I might come up with.

Please be aware that the time scale of the whole project is certainly 
too long to keep your breath. Applying for funding now, I could start 
working on it full time earliest in summer 2011. Until then, I cannot 
say how much time I could divert to this project.

In any case, I would really love to see a strong community for numerical 
computing arise around D!

Greetings,
Norbert