[boost] Re: Raw Array Classes

From: Andy Glew (glew_at_[hidden])
Date: 1999-09-03 10:07:04

> Have you looked at blitz++ library ? It uses no assembler, just templates etc. I'd be interested to see how it compared to raw
assembler,
> especially with a decent compiler.

A fellow from Argonne gave a talk at the UW last year about
"High Level Scientific Coding in C++".

Per him, they use Blitz++ and other C++ libraries extensively.

After I interrogated him extensively, it turned out:

(a) they write all of their code using Blitz++, etc., syntax
(b) they found that the template implementation was too slow
    for real work, although uaseful for debugging.
(c) for real, production, compilation, they wrote a
    Blitz++ to C compiler, that accepts high level statements
    using matrices, etc., in the Bltiz++ syntax,
    and which performs the usual optimizations that you would
    expect a good vectorizing compiler to do, finally emitting
    C assembly code.

My notes have his graphs indicating a 2X performance improvement
when using the Blitz++ to C translator, compared to using vanilla templates.