Complex Number Support?

[abstractqqq]

I am trying this in my package and it has significantly sped up higher dimension vector math for me.. I am wondering if complex number support is planned? Thank you

[ChillFish8]

Good to hear it is useful to you :)

I would say probably not in the near future as I'm not very familiar with complex number operations and they likely require some more specialized handling to do the standard arithmetic operations on most hardware.

Happy to accept PRs for it, I think most of the work would be around implementing the SimdRegister<T> trait on the various CPU flags and everything else should 'just work' but I am going to be sticking with non-complex types for now.

[skewballfox]

Happy to accept PRs for it, I think most of the work would be around implementing the SimdRegister trait on the various CPU flags and everything else should 'just work' but I am going to be sticking with non-complex types for now.

If you are interested, I can start a PR, though I'm not sure how fast I'll be able to complete it. Something that might be useful to reference for whoever does implement it is the AvxVector trait for rustfft and its implementations (one is on 827)

[ChillFish8]

Any contribution is welcome 😃 I think implementation-wise, it may come down to how to represent the complex types themselves. For ergonomics, it might be that we use an existing lib for the repr (or at least provide bytemuck support for it) which probably means having the complex number impls in a separate crate may be beneficial.

[skewballfox]

I think implementation-wise, it may come down to how to represent the complex types themselves. For ergonomics, it might be that we use an existing lib for the repr (or at least provide bytemuck support for it) which probably means having the complex number impls in a separate crate may be beneficial.

so a separate cfavml-complex crate that implements SimdRegister<num_comple::Complex<F>> (among other traits)? Also, I'm guessing we only care about floating point types. Is there a situation where you need complex ints?

[ChillFish8]

I suspect floats are going to be the main application for most people although personally I don't work with complex numbers much so I can't say concretely.

Targeting floats first would probably be a good initial step

[abstractqqq]

When I opened this issue, I was looking at complex vector multiplication which is a step in convolution (by FFT).

I think it's ok to build for floats first and then if someone request, add ints