[vtk-developers] Fitting code and it's place in VTK

[David Gobbi]

On Wed, 12 Sep 2001, Blezek, Daniel J (CRD) wrote:

> David,
>
>   I toyed around with clapack, blas and f2c on Tuesday.  blas went in very easily under CMake, but I
> abandoned it pending discussion on the mailing list, Kitware, and CRD.  I don't think the mechanics
> of adding blas, lapack, etc are difficult, it's defining the interface w/VTK that is the problem.

Yes, but that will be the case regardless of what numerical package is
chosen.  The most natural thing would be for a vtkDataArray to be used
as the basic 2D VTK array (where each 'tuple' is a row), but that makes
complex (real/imag) arrays difficult.  In any case, it will require a lot
of work & though.  Another option is for authors of VTK classes to use
the blas interface directly, and not provide a numerical interface for
the wrapper languages.

> One of the thoughts is to incorporate vnl, the numerics package from VXL and Insight into VTK.  That
> way we have one common numerics package across three different packages.  VXL, Insight, and VTK are
> very cross platform, so I know that vnl would fit in well.  Again the question is: do we add a
> "VTK-ish" layer to clapack/vnl, or just compile them in for use wherever needed in VTK.

My suggestion is just to include them for now.  Providing a VTK wrapper
layer will be a lot of work, and is really a separate issue.  I'm
not very picky about numerical packages.. I don't use them much, and
when I need them I care much more about their capabilities than about
cleanliness of the interface.

 - David