[swift-evolution] Which functionality should be covered by a native Swift math/numerics library that ships with the standard lib?

[Nevin Brackett-Rozinsky]

A few things immediately spring to mind:
• Fixed-size arrays
• An optimized Matrix type
• Swifty syntax for Fourier transforms
• A numerical integrator (or diff-eq solver!)
• BigInt capabilities

The first of these (fixed-size arrays) will probably require compiler
support.

The rest can already be done in a library, except I believe they will hit
the “generics cannot be specialized across module boundaries” slowdown, and
must be explicitly specialized for common numeric types to avoid it. (Has
this been fixed yet? Are there plans to?)

Nevin



On Wed, Aug 3, 2016 at 8:41 AM, Björn Forster <swift-evolution at swift.org>
wrote:

> Hello Swift community,
> to make use of Swift more appealing and useful for science, engineering
> and finance and everything else involving actually calculating things, I
> think it would be a big step forward if Swift would ship with its own
> math/numerics library.
>
> Wouldn't it be great if Swift would offer functionality similar to Numpy
> in its native math lib? It think it would be great to have a "standard"
> annotation for vector arithmetic that the Swift community has agreed on and
> that scientific packages can build on.
>
> Which functionality should be covered by a Swift's math lib and where
> should be drawn the line?
>
> Any thoughts?
>
> (If it is not the right time now to talk this topic, as it is not
> mentioned in the goals for Swift 4 by Chris, I apologize for bringing this
> up now. But I think then this should be discussed later at some point not
> in the infinite future)
>
> Björn
>
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>
>
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