Hi,

it has been a long discussion we all had for many months now. Should we rewrite ublas from scratch or simply improve it.

Joaquim and Oswin wants a brand new ublas

Nasos was more in favor of improving it.

I personally find very exciting the idea of writing something new, but ublas is very well known now. On the other hand, Eigen and Armadillo took the crown of the main C++ blas library in users' hearts.

On my todo list for ublas, there are things that will require ublas to be deeply changed. At this stage, we can almost talk about a new library.

Christmas is very close now, so maybe it's a good time to start talking about the features we wish for ublas and see if they can be implemented with the current version or if a new uBLAS 2.0 is necessary.
After all, Boost::signal did the same a few years ago. We can definitively do the transition.

I begin:

- unified representation of vectors and matrices to represent the fact that a vector IS a matrix. Matlab does the same

- automated use of different algorithm to let the compiler "chooses" the best implementation (if possible) and switch on SSE, distributed or whateve we need

- implementation of solvers and decompositions algorithms

and this is what Nasos and I think should be integrated too:

1. Matrix multiplication

2. Algorithms infrastructure (so that we can have real useful features)

3. Matrix/vector views for interoperability <- I think this is ultra critical because now ublas is monolithic in the sense that you have to use it everywhere you manipulate data. This would really help into letting people for example have a list of vectors (they are plotting) and ublas working on top of that to do for example transformations

4. NEW DOCUMENTATION - examples and the rest

5. Incorporate some critical bindings (i.e. mumps bindings which is currently probably the most efficient smp and distributed open source linalg solver)

6. matlab binding?

7. distributed ublas

Please add and ESPECIALLY, please tell me your view on the current infrastructure of uBLAS. It seems many people are not happy with the current "expression template" grammar.

I'm open to everything

Best,
David

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 11:14 AM, Joaquim Duran <jduran.gm@gmail.com> wrote:

I think that al stuff pending of merge listed by David, should be merged and migrate to uBlas 2.0 and while uBlas 2.0 is in development/maintenance then design from scratch uBlas 3.0.

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