Vee Kay <vkicefire <at> gmail.com> writes:

What would this offer over Boost.MultiArray?

My library and Boost.Multidim are actually orthogonal: the latter offers a specific family of containers, while the former is a collection of algorithms for generic programming with arbitrary container types. As an example, say one needs a template function which copies a nested container of unknown type T into an appropriate boost::multi_array. Using only STL and Boost this is not easy, as one has to heavily use metaprogramming to obtain the template parameters of the target multi_array (scalar type and dimensionality), and then more convolutions with recursion are needed to actually implement the copy. With multidim the same function can be written in about 10 lines, as the library provides all the requested functionalities: dimensionality() and scalarType() to determine the appropriate multi_array instantiation, bounds() to correctly size it, and flattening views to copy source to destination with a single 'for' loop. Here I have somewhat cheated, since I wrote multidim specifically to solve such kind of problems, but nonetheless I hope to have shown how my code could add functionality to Boost and cooperate nicely with its components. Regards, Alberto Marnetto