[Rcpp-devel] Fwd: Element-wise matrix operations

Dirk Eddelbuettel edd at debian.org
Sat Jan 20 23:53:15 CET 2018


On 20 January 2018 at 17:45, Jason Nielsen wrote:
| Hi all,
| 
| I was wondering if there is a technical reason that element-wise matrix
| operations between Rcpp's Matrix type aren't implemented.  There is
| vector/vector, vector/scalar and matrix/scalar but no matrix/matrix.  The
| following naive code:
| 
| #include <Rcpp.h>
| using namespace Rcpp;
| 
| NumericMatrix operator+(NumericMatrix A, NumericMatrix B) {
|   if ((A.nrow() != B.nrow()) | (A.ncol() != B.ncol()))
|     stop("Dimensions of the two matrices do not conform!");
|   NumericVector vA = as<NumericVector>(A);
|   NumericVector vB = as<NumericVector>(B);
|   NumericVector vC = vA + vB;
|   NumericMatrix C = NumericMatrix(A.nrow(), A.ncol(), vC.begin());
|   return C;
| }
| 
| // [[Rcpp::export]]
| NumericMatrix MatAdd(const NumericMatrix A, const NumericMatrix B) {
|   return A+B;
| }
| 
| works.  From my brief fiddling it seems there is no copying going on above
| so I don't think there is too much extra overhead in the abstraction.  My
| guess is that it just hasn't been a priority and "patches happily accepted"
| is the answer but I'm curious if there is some other less obvious reason as
| it seems to me all the heavy lifting was done to implement vector/vector.

R code:

   sample(c("History", "Lazyness"), 1)   ## just kidding. or maybe not.

Years back I usually pointed at RcppArmadillo if you wanted "math with
matrices" as we just didn't have all the operators. Now, we have been filling
them in, so this operator+() makes some sense.  Doing them "well" in the
template code is a bit more involved but mayne you want to poke around?

I am sure some of the regulars here would be happy to help you along.

Dirk

-- 
http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com | @eddelbuettel | edd at debian.org


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