> Does anyone have a link either to a slightly more leisurely exposition of the theory behind it, or perhaps a more user-focused summary of what kind of featur

> Does anyone have a link either to a slightly more leisurely exposition of the theory behind it, or perhaps a more user-focused summary of what kind of features and optimisations this new magic might enable? No, but those will be forthcoming as we build out more of it. We are targeting an end-of-November preview release, as the slides indicate, and it will give people a much more concrete idea of the things Blaze can do. > the idea is to use a fairly flexible and expressive metadata language under the hood to specify the physical memory layout of a multi-dimensional array Yep, that's exactly right. The challenge is to constrain this is that it is not too general, i.e. enters into PhD research land, but still useful for a large number of use cases. One of the core ideas is to more coherently represent the metadata about location, locality/compute affinity, and index spaces. Numpy has the beginnings of some of these ideas in its various flags and View object semantics, but it's all stuck in its very rigid, contiguous-memory origins. > At which point does one decide that traversal is now excessively complicated and the thing should be copied into a flat layout. This would be a great Master's research project. :-) The hope and the belief is that one can punt on resolving this in generality, and still solve a number of interesting, concrete problems in an efficient way.