Re: RFC: Add `final class Vector` to PHP

Good afternoon Christian, On Fri, Sep 17, 2021 at 3:07 PM Christian Schneider <cschneid@cschneid.com> wrote: > > Am 17.09.2021 um 04:09 schrieb tyson andre <tysonandre775@hotmail.com>: > > I've created a new RFC > > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/vector proposing to add > > final class Vector to PHP. > > > First of all: I don't have a strong opinion on a Vector class being useful or necessary. > > But I have two comments about this RFC: > 1) Using the very generic name Vector without any prefix/namespace seems dangerous and asking > for BC breaks. > 2) I don't like that this class is final. The reasons given in > https://wiki.php.net/rfc/vector#final_class <÷W ‘ÊË韊 > ‚™n…Ê‘https://wiki.php.net/rfc/vector#final_class> seem unconvincing to me and > restrict the usage of Vector in a way which makes me question the usefulness to a big enough part of > the PHP community. > > These two reasons combined would make me reject the RFC at the current stage. I think it is more in a draft stage for discussions. To be more precise with my earlier reply, I only see such additions as useful if it is an actual Vector as known in other languages and widely used the last years in ML and other similar areas like data or image processing. To me a vector is useful if it allows vectorized operations, as in SIMD, AltVec, CUBA etc. Some refs: https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~franzf/teaching/slides-18-645-simd.pdf https://indico.cern.ch/event/238763/attachments/401939/558861/HP-intel_mic_optimization.pdf These two refer to Intel architecture but ARM (especiall v9 with Neon, MIPS, ppc and maybe soon riscV does support such operations as well. It is amazingly well suited for raw performance increase. I can imagine having annotations and/or specific optimization for vectors of scalar processing. It requires a bit of (re)thinking, but it is totally worth it. Generic multiple data types vectors are less useful for such things and SplFixedArray does it already, if I understand the RFC, as it stands now, correctly. best, -- Pierre @pierrejoye | http://www.libgd.org