What is the need of Eigen2???

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What is the need of Eigen2???
by Sebastian on Tuesday 11/Dec/2007, @05:29

As a scientist I am in doubt if the creation of a KDE oriented math library like Eigen or Eigen2 is a good choice. Why do I believe so: Eigen2 seems to be applied to a wide range of problems (each of very special). I foresay the need, for example, to implement various algorithms and data structures for the same problem class depending on parameters like system size, required accuracy, cpu power vs. memory demands... Within the scientific community highly performant libraries have been developed for such purposes such as LAPACK, ARPACK, etc. It is widely acknowledged that algorithms implemented in C/++ are still considerably slower than FORTRAN libraries such that only wrappers/interfaces are provided for FORTRAN libraries. Such a wrapper is for example provided by the trilinos project, one of the most comprehensive approaches in my opinion. I do not know how the Eigen lib is organized internally or if it already wraps around another lib. But inventing the wheel again is a pain in the ass. I simply do not believe that KDE has the power, time and (technological) comptetences to develop its own optimized math codes.

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Re: What is the need of Eigen2???
by Benoit Jacob on Monday 24/Dec/2007, @07:22

You might look at it the converse way. The existing math libs may look satisfying to a numerical engineer, but from the point of view of a c++ software developer they are _horrible_ and they don't even cover the needs of simple apps, for instance they don't handle fixed-size objects. Since many projects besides KDE need linear algebra, you can bet that Eigen2 will easily find its public, hence a pool of potential contributor. In fact, even the very minimalistic Eigen1 was received with enthusiasm from game developers.

And yes, we are planning to wrap around existing libs for what we don't want to reinvent.

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Re: What is the need of Eigen2???
by Benoit Jacob on Monday 24/Dec/2007, @07:35

Regarding C++ being much faster than FORTRAN: what you state here was true until 1994, when Expression Templates were invented:

http://ubiety.uwaterloo.ca/~tveldhui/papers/Expression-Templates/exprtmpl.html

By the way, Eigen2 has the world's most concise implementation of expression templates.

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