Working notes - Indexing++

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The goal of this page is to summarize the different ideas and working plan to (finally!) provide support for flexible row/column indexing in Eigen. See this bug report.

Needs

We aim to support various indexing mechanisms. For each dimension, we would like to be able to have any of:

  • all: as in A(:)
  • singleton: as in A(3) (already supported!)
  • index-array: as in A([3 1 5])
  • range-based: as in A(3:9) (partly supported via Block)
  • slicing: as in A(3:2:9)
  • negative indices: as in A(end-3) or A(3:2:end-1)
  • boolean masking: as in A(A>0)

All of this with a concise and unambiguous API! We should also be able to provide compile-time information such as lengths.

C++11 API

Since achieving a lean API in C++03 seems to be rather impossible, let's first see what could be done in C++11 and provide more verbose fallbacks for C++03.


C++03 fallback API

Internal implementation details

Performance

One could be tempted to leverage AVX2 gather/scatter instructions, but those are horribly slow. Better emulate them for now.