[vtk-developers] vtkVectorOperators

[David Lonie]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 8:18 AM, Marcus D. Hanwell
<marcus.hanwell at kitware.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 10:58 AM, David Lonie <loniedavid at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 7:16 AM, Marcus D. Hanwell
>> <marcus.hanwell at kitware.com> wrote:
>>> Many of these functions are in a separate header, called
>>> vtkVectorOperators.h, along with tests in
>>> Common/Testing/Cxx/TestVectorOperators.cxx. I think it is missing
>>> scalar multiplication, and possible negation (would have to check). As
>>> you have everything working without, I can review the branch as is and
>>> then perhaps get it using some of the operators again at some point in
>>> the future.
>>
>> I took a stab at implementing these, but I've run into a
>> metaprogramming issue that I'm not familiar with. I've put up a draft
>> here:
>>
>> https://github.com/dlonie/VTK/commit/674474eabc45f38be7eac1406039326141c059e9
>>
>> The trouble seems to be in the macros used to generate the operators
>> for the predefined types. I get this rather cryptic compiler error:
>
> As far as I know, compound assignment operators should be member
> functions. If that were the case, then most of the other operators
> could actually be simplified to re-use that code on the temporary that
> is returned. Did you try just implementing the minimal set of missing
> operators first?

Ah, that may be it -- now that I think of it, I've never tried making
compound assignment operators like this before. I'm planning to work
on VTK again tomorrow morning, I'll try this out.

>> Seems like the trouble could be the static cast from vtkVector<Type,
>> Size> to vtkVectorXX (see the last line of the compiler snippet), but
>> the rest of the output makes no sense to me, so I'm not sure ;-) What
>> would be the most efficient way to cast the vtkVector<,> to a
>> vtkVectorXX?
>>
>  The static_cast is probably not the most efficient way of doing this,
> and typedefs would have yielded this behavior in a much more elegant
> fashion. I was going to take another look if I ever got the chance, if
> the underlying storage is the same (3 floats, 2 doubles etc) then a
> reinterpret_cast would be the most efficient method of doing this as
> far as I know.

IIRC, the reason for choosing this design was so that the underlying
storage would be the same as a straight array, for instance the test
for

  vtkVector2i vec2i;
  int arr2i[2] = { 0, 0 };
  vec2i.Set(arr2i[0], arr2i[1]);

  if (sizeof(vec2i) != sizeof(arr2i))
    {
    // The two should be the same size and memory layout - error out if not
    cerr << "vtkVector2i should be the same size as int[2]." << endl
        << "sizeof(vec2i) = " << sizeof(vec2i) << endl
        << "sizeof(int[2]) = " << sizeof(arr2i) << endl;
    ++retVal;
    }

So AIUI a reinterpret_cast should be safe.

Dave