Re: [boost] Re: uBLAS formal review

From: Joerg Walter (jhr.walter_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-06-27 16:09:20

----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Stevens" <support-1_at_[hidden]>
To: <boost_at_[hidden]>
Sent: Thursday, June 27, 2002 2:58 AM
Subject: [boost] Re: uBLAS formal review

[snip]

>       * What is your evaluation of the implementation?
>
> The code is well structured and and highly readable (if template C++ can
> be readable!). It is portable; it even compiles with VC6! The
> implementation clearly makes a significant effort at efficient
> compilation and execution. Certainly with VC7 dense matrices perform
> well, with little "abstration overhead". It seems however there is
> significant variability on other compilers!
> There are probably many area where the implementation could be made more
> efficient. For example the algorithms used for large column_major
> matrices have poor locality of reference.

I believe I've just seen a terrible proof of this. So it has a high priority
on the todo list already. Thanks very much for the useful hint.

> Fixing this would require
> adding additional dispatch logic and algorithms that iterate linearly
> over the column_major orientation. Alternatively assignment algorithms
> for same orientation matrices could be performed by vectorisation.
>
>       * What is your evaluation of the documentation?
>
> At present this seems to be uBLAS's major weakness.

Ok.

> The individual
> features are fairly completely documented but often lack explanation and
> meaningful examples. There is a great deal of information regarding the
> concepts and structure of uBLAS that needs to be explicitly documented.
> For this part of the documentation it would be worth considering using
> Bill Kempf's structure and templates.

I believe it's already ambitious enough, to get good STL-style documentation
;-)

> I like the sections on the uBLAS syntax required to perform BLAS
> operations, and also the efficiency and timing results. However they may
> be better placed in there own pages.
> If uBLAS is included into Boost I would hope that some of this
> documentation could be contributed by the community.

[snip]

Regards

Joerg