Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by cmontella 1425 days ago
Hey, thanks! That's one of the main and crucial differences between Mech and Eve, actually. The main reason I went with tables in Mech is because of the robotics domain. Robotics has a lot of linear algebra and much of the math can be parallelized naturally. This means in Mech we can store columns as contiguous arrays, and take advantage of SIMD optimizations. The triple store in Eve worked well with the whole relational algebra nature of that language, so it was a natural fit there. Not so much for my use case.

Maybe there's room for an Eve-Mech bridge where Eve can be used on the knowledge representation side, and Mech for the lower-level motion planning stuff. That's a fun thought!
1 comments
j-pb 1424 days ago
Really interesting point. I always figured I'd go with an ECS system like specs for the high perf case, but you're absolutely right, columnar storage is gonna be orders of magnitude faster. (Fun fact, the hibitset of specs looks _a lot_ like a worst case optimal join.) A GPU/FPGA accelerated Mech would be really really cool :D.

A hybrid system is a really interesting idea. I actually wrote my bachelors thesis on a system heavily inspired by EVE to be used for knowledge representation in robotics and have been experimenting a lot with implementations of the idea over the years. You should really open a Mech discord channel, I'd love to hang around and help build something like that :D.

link
cmontella 1424 days ago
Do you have a link to your thesis? I'd really like to read it!

GPU/FPGA Mech has been my dream since like... forever. I started taking a crack at it here: https://gitlab.com/mech-lang/core/-/blob/gpu/src/bin/gpu.rs, but mostly I was just figuring out wgpu's capabilities in Rust. But that was months ago and I've since decided to push it off until after I launch what I have done already.

I have a private slack that I've been using to work with my students, I'd love to send you an invite. Send me an email at corey@mech-lang.org and I'll send it to you. I've been putting off doing a discord channel because I wanted to code up a chat app in Mech instead :P I think I'm almost there but I've been thinking that for years >_<. If I don't have one by the time I launch in October I'll probably bite the bullet and do discord then.

link