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Blitz Devel : |
From: Julian Cummings (cummings_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-12-05 13:53:00
Hello Juan,
Since I know Todd V. is pretty busy these days working on
writing up his PhD thesis, I will give you my input. I have
been working in the past few months with Patrick Guio and
a few others to maintain and continue improving Blitz. We
both use Blitz extensively in our work and want to see it
continue in active use.
Juan José Gómez Cadenas wrote:
> 1) What is the status of Blitz? Is there a team currently active? Do you have
> development plans in the near future?
We recently moved the Blitz project to SourceForge so that it would be
easier for others to contribute to its continued development. Todd, Patrick
and I are managing the project, and a few folks have signed on as active
developers. Anyone can contribute suggestions, bugfixes or new code via
the SourceForge.net website.
> 2) What is your opinion of Bob Tinsdale proposal for a standard vector and
> Matrix class? I tried to contact him, but there is a problem with his mail
> box. Is that proposal going anywhere? If so, ¿is there any plans to implement
> Blitz "behind" the proposed interface?
I have heard of this proposal but have not studied it carefully enough to
have an opinion. In general, I am all for standardized interfaces and adhering
to generic programming concepts. I would hope that the Blitz Vector and
Matrix classes could be used to implement Tinsdale's proposed standard with
the appropriate adaptor classes.
> 3) I see in your code that you have implemented Vector and Matrix classes but
> do not discuss them in the documentation, where you prefer to refer to
> general arrays. ¿Any particular reason?
The online documentation is old and somewhat incomplete. We have talked
recently about utilizing doxygen to generate more current code documentation.
Of course, the prose of the existing documentation should be maintained and
extended if possible, since it provides much more than just a description of the
available classes and methods.
> 4) In particular, SLMVT has a few nice functions for linear algebra
> manipulations (such as LU decomposition, etc.) which are extremely useful for
> us. One could think on extending Blitz Matrix classes to provide that
> functionality (it should be rather straight forward).
As Suresh mentioned in his reply, there are some folks such as himself
interested in implementing some of the standard linear algebra functions
in Blitz using the Blitz Matrix class and expression syntax. I think what
we will be doing in the short term is gathering such contributions into a
new "algorithms" subdirectory within the Blitz source code tree and just
making them available for whoever wants to use them. I think this is a
good way to increase usage of Blitz by providing concrete examples of how
the Blitz containers and syntax can be put to use.
> Incidentally, I downloaded Blitz to my laptop, and compile it with gcc 3.1
> without a wisper. There will be some resistance to used Blitz given that
> MSVC, as I understand, does not manage to compile it, but we have a large
> LINUX community, using gcc. However, I wonder if you will ever try to compile
> with Microsoft Stuff (not that I am a big fun, mind you).
I am participating as a beta tester of the new Microsoft Visual Studio .NET
compiler suite, which should be released fairly soon. It seems to handle most
or all of the Blitz test and example codes. MS has done a lot to make their
C++ compiler more ANSI standard compliant. I have not had enough time
to look hard at the issue of code performance under this new compiler. When
the compiler is released, I will make available the appropriate project files (or
"solution" files as they are now called) for building the Blitz library, test
codes
and examples.
I hope this answers some of your questions regarding Blitz.
Regards, Julian C.
-- Dr. Julian C. Cummings E-mail: cummings_at_[hidden] California Institute of Technology Phone: 626-395-2543 1200 E. California Blvd., Mail Code 158-79 Fax: 626-584-5917 Pasadena, CA 91125