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The thing about operator overloading is that it was abused during one of the worst era of C++. And vec2 + vec2 can probably be unambiguously translated to asse
by stephc_int13 4y ago
The thing about operator overloading is that it was abused during one of the worst era of C++.
And vec2 + vec2 can probably be unambiguously translated to assembly code while mat4 * mat4 is an other story. In most cases it should be a function call, and not a trivial one, with SIMD it can be relatively fast but still several orders of magnitude slower than 1 + 1. (we're talking about more than 500 scalar-equivalent operations)
And unfortunately, from my experience, if you let people (especially new coders) use this kind of powerful syntactic sugar they tend to ignore the performance characteristics because it look so simple and basic, like if the CPU had a special instruction to multiply two 4x4 matrices.
I prefer when the function call is explicit, it is a bit more cumbersome to write, but there is less hidden complexity.
- Kukumber 4y ago> I prefer when the function call is explicit, it is a bit more cumbersome to write, but there is less hidden complexity. you hide and obfuscate basic operations with functions, that's worse, specially when you have to chain arithmetic operations, with functions it becomes ugly and unreadable
- stephc_int13 4y agoShow me an example and I am pretty sure that I can rewrite it in a way that is neither ugly nor unreadable.
- stephc_int13 4y agoMatrix multiplication or even worse, matrix inversion, is NOT a basic operation. This is exactly the point.
- littlestymaar 4y agoInteger division isn't a simple one either though… Matrix multiplication are “basic operations” in the sense that you use them as the basic block of your algorithms, and in code using such blocks you really appreciate having a simple operator for those instead of littering your formula with functions calls (which is basically writing your formulas in Polish notation, not the most legible way to write formulas …)
- dolmen 4y agoMatrix multiplication is a niche in the programming world.
- littlestymaar 4y agoThe programming world is made of niches. That's why arithmetic operator overloading is nice, the language doesn't need to know which niche I'm in to satisfy my needs.
- cycomanic 4y agoI somewhat agree with you, I argue that mat*mat should be an element wise operation and use a different operator for matrix operations (like numpy does it).
- kllrnohj 4y ago> Matrix multiplication or even worse, matrix inversion, is NOT a basic operation. Neither is dividing floats, especially not on a softfloat & softdiv architecture. And yet, Zig is perfectly OK with you using division between 2 floats. Why does it get to insert expensive function calls behind operators but I can't? Zig also lets you do remainder division for floats, which is also not a "basic operation." It's slower even then taking the sqrt of a float! Zig then also has specialized operators like saturating addition, which also isn't a "basic operation" And then Zig also has `*` for array multiplication and `++` for array concatenation. Those are compile-time only, but still deviates from "basic operations only" territory surely. And also Zig overloads `||` to allow for the merging of enums (sorry, "error sets"), rather than only being a boolean OR.