Jed Brown:
On 12 Mar 2008, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I don't think there are a great deal of Haskell users who _really_
need a physics engine right now. However, there seem to be a massive
number who are working with matrices. I am informed that a lot of
physics is just matrix stuff underneath (but don't know anything
myself).
Perhaps a nice direction to take this project would be to build an
NDP
matrix library first, then use that library to build a physics engine
on top of it. A physics engine would certainly be very cool, and a
parallel matrix library would certainly be very much in demand.
Indeed, a matrix library would be really nice. Before getting serious
about this, please take a very close look at how PETSc
(http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/) handles matrices. The
abstraction
is very important because most large matrices of interest are sparse
or
have some symmetry that makes them asymptotically cheaper to apply
(like
with an FFT, FMM, or tensor product).
I agree that a good matrix library would be very useful. However, I
am less sure that starting with a general matrix library is a good way
to make progress towards a physics engine. Especially, for a simple
engine we have a small set of (application-dependent) types of
matrices, requiring a small number of the many possible matrices
representations. In contrast, to write a good general-purpose matrix
library, you need to support a whole range of representation and
algorithms.
In my experience, it is a lot harder to get somebody who is motivated
to write a general-purpose library than getting somebody who is
motivated to write an application, which you can run and show to
people at the end. Don't get me wrong, if there is anybody who wants
to write a matrix library using NDP, that would be absolutely
fabulous, but otherwise I'd happily settle for a person who implements
just enough matrix operations to get some nice physics going.
Manuel
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