> On 3. Aug 2017, at 00:43, Xiaodi Wu via swift-evolution > <swift-evolution@swift.org> wrote: > > > On Wed, Aug 2, 2017 at 17:37 Nicolas Fezans <nicolas.fez...@gmail.com > <mailto:nicolas.fez...@gmail.com>> wrote: > I think that the items mentioned earlier in the list (just reminded below) > should not all be treated equally. > > - RNG and cryptography library (CryptoSwift could be a good base for this) > - Generic Math library/Vector library > - Basic data structures (Tree, Balanced Tree, Heap, Queue, SkipList, graphs, > etc) > - Modern DateTime library > - Modern String processing toolkit > - 2D Graphics library (similar to cairo) > - Windowing/UI library > > By that I mean that I see at least one distinction to make between: > > a) the libraries that would make Swift and the programmer experience with > these libraries under Swift significantly better if they are (or at least > feel) deeply integrated in the language (for instance with associated syntax > / syntax sugar) > and > b) those that would not really benefit from such an integration to the > language. > > For me a core math library, clearly belongs to category a) > I am of course not talking about a syntax sugar to call a sin or cos > function, but rather to manipulate other objects such as N-dimensional > matrices, defining maths functions that can take such matrices as argument > e.g. sin(A) with A as matrix produces a matrix of the same size where all > elements are the sinus values of the elements of A (sorry but things like > this calling map() with 'sin' looks quite ugly for scientists). > Such a good math syntax should be compact enough to have complete equations > looking "close enough" to the maths equations you could have written in a > LaTeX or Word documentation of your scientific code. IMO a well integrated > swift core math library should feel a Julia or Matlab code (while still > having the power of Swift in terms of speed and modern programming paradigms) > instead of looking and feeling like 'numpy'. But the latter is what you get > if you just make a math library with no integration to the language syntax, > operators, and basic functions. > > I agree that if this would require compiler support, then it needs to be part > of the standard library. However, I don't see anything about what you > describe that cannot be supported as a third-party library.
It’s important to remember that computers are mathematical machines, and some functions which are implemented in hardware on essentially every platform (like sin/cos/etc) are definitely best implemented as compiler intrinsics. That said, I don’t think N-dimensional matrices need to be part of the standard library. I still think there’s plenty of space for good library implementations. We can’t realistically expect anybody to implement a (fast) cosine function from scratch, though. I think Swift should allow you to write a standard scientific calculator without downloading a mathematics library. Essentially, that means basic trig, exponentiation and logarithms. Possibly even factorials. - Karl
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