[Help-gsl] Re: Question: gsl in C++ ??

[Lionel B]

On Wed, 14 Mar 2007 14:34:56 -0300, Paulo Jabardo wrote:

> Apparently Blitz++ hasn't seen much development.
> 
> Some parts of boost might become part of the new C++
> standard.
> 
> Concerning Valarrays, according to Josuttis[1]
> valarrays weren't very well defined. Apparently the
> guys who designed valarray left the C++ committee long
> before the standard was finished and the specification
> wasn't tested at the time.
> I have no experience with that...

There has indeed been a good deal of criticism that the the design of
valarrays was not very well thought out - they don't fit neatly into the
STL "container" paradigm and the syntax can be a little flaky.

Having said which, I use them (recent GNU implementation) extensively
with absolutely no problems, and have found them to be as fast as - or
even faster on occasion - than C arrays, most likely due to their being
alias-free and hence potentially highly optimisable and vectorisable. And,
as several people have pointed out, they are BLAS-compatible and the slice
mechanism seems like a natural for implementing multi-dimensional arrays.

Regards,

-- 
Lionel B