Re: GSOC 2013

Sorry, I don't want to spam.

Here a list of suggestions which I find way more important than unifying 
matrices and vectors:

1. change the way iterators work for matrices, as already outlined here
http://www.crystalclearsoftware.com/cgi-bin/boost_wiki/wiki.pl?UBLAS_Matrix_Iterators 

over 6 years ago.

The reason why this should be important? I have an application where I 
need to compute a lot of distances between vectors and matrix-rows (in 
row-oriented matrices). If the arguments are sparse (and I use a 
compressed matrix), i am more than factor 3 slower than the simple 
for-loop using the internal arrays of the compressed matrix. The main 
bottle neck is CompressedMatrix::find for the two queries of the 
begin/end iterators, which should in this case be only 2 memory lookups 
but is ridiculously slow in the ublas design. But even afterwards, this 
leads to a much slower iterator than just iterating the arrays.

When I wrote a workaround wrapper for that which takes a matrix-row of a 
compressed matrix and implements the sane iterator for that, i get the 
expected speed-up(minus a small overhead for the wrapper itself...).

2. change the way matrix-expressions are evaluated. In the current 
iterator based design, not even transposing a matrix can be done fast. I 
am currently playing a round with a design which interprets expressions like

A+= 3.0*subrange(expression,a,b,c,d)

as
expression.plusAssignTo(A,a,b,c,d,3.0);

and suddenly everything can be implemented very easy and fast (and also 
very general).

3. proxies of "real" vectors/matrices(i.e. vectors which can be left 
hand side arguments) should make use of the memory layout of the 
underlying vector/matrix. The created wrappers should be interchangeable 
when the underlying object has the same memory layout. That means taking 
a matrix row of a row-major dense matrix should lead to the same proxy 
as taking a subrange of a vector. Moreover a vector should be implicitly 
convertible to it's wrapper type.

reason:
struct Foo{

virtual void doSomething(dense_vector_proxy<double> const& wrapper);
};
Foo foo;
blas::matrix<double> m;
blas::vector<double> v;
foo.doSomething(row(m,0));
foo.doSomething(v);

This is of course only my opinion, but these are the things which cost 
me the most time right now.
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