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I would like to do some experiments in computer graphics in Haskell. This will include doing some geometry calculations and ultimately writing a ray tracer. Which library should I pick for easy handling of vectors, matrices and relevant operations on them?

There are few on Hackage including nice looking ones like vect and AC-Vector, but it's easy to miss a good candidate among so many different libraries.

Tener
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2 Answers2

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For vectors and matrices that are used for transformations, vect probably is your best bet. It is optimized for fast, lower-precision (as in Double precision as opposed to Ratio precision) transformations like you described, and its role as the matrix stack in lambdacube (as an example of an application where performance is key) shows that it is fast enough for most applications.

For data matrices - that are used for images, for example - you'd probably want to use repa, especially when doing data-parallel computations such as ray tracing.

dflemstr
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There is an interesting library called vector-space by Conal Eliott which allows you to lazily compute Taylor series of many analytic functions. See also here. Not sure about performance, though.

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mnish
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  • Vector-space is very useful for the type classes it provides which extend the Num hierarchy (it is still very useful without the linear map and derivative tower stuff). You need to provide your own Point, Vector, etc. datatypes. – stephen tetley Feb 28 '12 at 07:50