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by bmitc 792 days ago
Is there a collection of algorithms published somewhere, in a coherent manner? It seems like to me, there should be a collection of matrix algebra, symbolic algebra, etc. algorithms somewhere that makes it easy to implement these in any language or system. As it is, it seems you need to already be an expert or researcher in the space to make any movement.
2 comments

BLIS is an interesting new direction in that regard: https://github.com/flame/blis

>The BLAS-like Library Instantiation Software (BLIS) framework is a new infrastructure for rapidly instantiating Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) functionality. Its fundamental innovation is that virtually all computation within level-2 (matrix-vector) and level-3 (matrix-matrix) BLAS operations can be expressed and optimized in terms of very simple kernels.

Interesting. Thanks for the heads up!
One could argue that libraries like BLAS/LAPACK are those collections...
That can be argued, but they're pretty esoteric. For example, what language are they written in? Fortran, assembly, etc.? Probably nothing the majority of developers or mathematicians can't understand. And creating bindings for them is non-trivial. I don't even know where to start from the website. And on the website, all the links to the routines are broken. https://www.netlib.org/blas/
The naming convention is a bit esoteric, but once you figure it out it's not too bad. I don't think writing bindings is too hard once you know what's going on. You most likely would want to write some kind of wrapper on top of that in order to make things a little more user-friend.

I will agree with you on the routines being broken. That happened within the past year. Not sure why it happened, but it's annoying. If you know the name of the routine you can usually find documentation on another site.