[Bf-committers] How about adding boost uBLAS library to blender/extern?

[Benoit Bolsee]

Regarding Eigen2, I received additional explanations from the main
developper Benoit Jacob. It shows a nice commitment to future
improvements:

> it has automatic SIMD and cache friendly optimization

Yup indeed :)

> it provides out of the box SVD decomposition

Indeed. The current SVD code, in Eigen 2.0, is taken from the public
domain JAMA. It's decent but not a killer. My top priority right now is
to get a much more SVD, written from scratch, in Eigen 2.1. In
particular it will be extremely stable numerically, it should have
efficient fixed-size specializations, and it should of course take full
advantage of the Eigen framework. My motivation is that this is one of
the most asked-for features.

Eigen 2.0 will be released next week. Eigen 2.1 will be used heavily by
KDE 4.3 so has to be released around June or July.

>MSVC 2005 and up (MSVC 2008 for SSE
>optimization), gcc 3.3 and up (gcc 4 for SIMD optimization), recent ICC

>(9? 10?, 11?).

GCC 4.2 for SIMD. For ICC, I don't know exactly because it's not me who
tested it. There were at least successful reports with ICC 10.

> However, current version is beta6,

Yep, final release next week.

>API is stable for dense matrices

Mostly. In Eigen 2.0 we marked many parts as experimental to retain some
freedom, although we will ensure 99.9% compatibility for our important
users. If Blender uses Eigen we will work with you to minimize trouble.
Our goal is to shed the experimentalness and extend the API stability
guarantee to much more of Eigen for the 2.1 release around June.

>it is already used by many projects

Indeed new projects switch every week.

> and available as a package in various
>Linux distributions.

Indeed, mostly thanks to KDE and KOffice depending on it.