Matrix API support - start with formats?

[jmh530 via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 14 August 2015 at 19:19:24 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
>
> One concern I have is the choice of MKL, which due to cost and 
> license reasons, many developers will not have on all (or even 
> any) of their machines.
>
> I don't work with sparse matrices often so I do not know which 
> libraries are most popular, but at a minimum I think it is 
> necessary to say you can use it with a popular open source 
> library. Given the importance of MKL, it would be a bad idea to 
> not offer a compatible format, but it would be equally bad to 
> focus on only MKL.

I agree. MKL is expensive. OpenBLAS is supposed have comparable 
performance, more or less, and it is free. Alternately, ATLAS can 
be used to build BLAS on many different systems.

I would also distinguish between the low level API like BLAS and 
OpenBLAS and higher level APIs. Good higher level APIs allow 
drop-in replacement of lower level APIs (e.g. Armadillo).