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> Since there hasn't been any response from anybody else who actually
builds extensions
> relying on numerical arrays in Lua on this list, it looks like there
is little interest or
> community for this in Lua. Thanks again to everybody who
responded.
I imagine there are plenty of users who may well use or write extensions or
interfaces relying on numerical arrays.
I can see some benefit in a standard, certainly, and anyone who’s into
serious computational stuff these days it would have to be FFI based for speed,
for a start. Certainly there could be wrappers on top of that to define a
standard, that’s not too much of a problem.
As a Visual Effects / Image Processing application, we certainly do, and I
guess I can only speak from that field, but I think, for us, I’m just not sure
how useful it would be, unless I’m missing the point somewhat.
Dealing with multiple image processing APIs, SDKs, Formats, Applications
etc, that we need to support, I can’t rally see too much benefit... is the data
8 bit/channel, 16 bit? 16 float? 32 float? 10 bit linear? 10 bit log? Does
it have Alpha, or is it Alpha only? Is the alpha packed in or as a
separate buffer? Are there additional channels such as Z, Normals, etc,
and what format are they in? Is the data BGRA, RGBA, or some other
format? Is the image buffer a contiguous block or an array of pointer per
scanline? Is it big or little endian data, and if endian conversion is
required should it be split on channels, pixels, or 32 bit words? Is the
origin top left or bottom left?
These are all issues we have to deal with when handing various different
APIs and formats of data (yes it could all be normalised, and in many cases is,
but there are unacceptable speed/accuracy tradeoffs in other cases); and so I
suppose for us the big issues is all about data representation format
standardisation, not array format standardisation. And that’s not really
going to happen any time soon.
An array format is great, I have no issue with that, but it’s not like we
would be able to simply pass it from one component/extension to another and
expect it to work without knowing how to interpret the data anyway.
Again this is just for our particular use case / industry.
Love, Light and Peace,
- Peter
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