Crate ultraviolet

source ·
Expand description

ultraviolet

This is a crate to computer-graphics and games-related linear and geometric algebra, but fast, both in terms of productivity and in terms of runtime performance.

In terms of productivity, ultraviolet uses no generics and is designed to be as straightforward of an interface as possible, resulting in fast compilation times and clear code. In addition, the lack of generics and Rust type-system “hacks” result in clear and concise errors that are easy to parse and fix for the user.

In terms of runtime performance, ultraviolet was designed from the start with performance in mind. To do so, we provide two separate kinds of each type, each with nearly identical functionality, one with usual scalar f32 values, and the other a ‘wide’ type which uses SIMD f32x4 vectors for each value. This design is clear and explicit in intent, and it also allows code to take full advantage of SIMD.

The ‘wide’ types use an “SoA” (Structure of Arrays) architecture such that each wide data structure actually contains the data for 4 or 8 of its associated data type and will do any operation on all of the simd ‘lanes’ at the same time. For example, a Vec3x8 is equivalent to 8 Vec3s all bundled together into one data structure.

Doing this is potentially much (factor of 10) faster than an standard “AoS” (Array of Structs) layout, though it does depend on your workload and algorithm requirements. Algorithms must be carefully architected to take full advantage of this, and doing so can be easier said than done, especially if your algorithm involves significant branching.

ultraviolet was the first Rust math library to be designed in this “AoSoA” manner, though nalgebra now supports it for several of their data structures as well.

Benchmarks

See mathbench-rs for latest benchmarks.

Cargo Features

To help further improve build times, ultraviolet puts various functionality under feature flags. For example, the 2d and 3d projective geometric algebras as well as f64 and integer types are disabled by default. In order to enable them, enable the corresponding crate feature flags in your Cargo.toml. For example:

[dependencies]
ultraviolet = { version = "0.9", features = [ "f64", "int" ] }

Will enable the f64 and int features. Here’s a list of the available features:

  • f64 – Enable f64 bit wide floating point support. Naming convention is D[Type], such as DVec3x4 would be a collection of 4 3d vectors with f64 precision each.
  • int – Enable integer vector types.
  • bytemuck – Enable casting of many types to byte arrays, for use with graphics APIs.
  • mint – Enable interoperation with other math crates through the mint interface.
  • num-traits – Enable identity traits for interoperation with other math crates.
  • serde – Enable Serialize and Deserialize implementations for many scalar types.

Crate Features

This crate is currently being dogfooded in my ray tracer rayn, and is being used by various independent Rust game developers for various projects. It does what those users have currently needed it to do.

There are a couple relatively unique/novel features in this library, the most important being the use of the Geometric Algebra.

Instead of implementing complex number algebra (for 2d rotations) and Quaternion algebra (for 3d rotations), we use Rotors, a concept taken from Geometric Algebra, to represent 2d and 3d rotations.

What this means for the programmer is that you will be using the Rotor3 type in place of a Quaternion, though you can expect it to do basically all the same things that a Quaternion does. In fact, Quaternions are directly isomorphic to Rotors (meaning they are in essense the same thing, just formulated differently). The reason this decision was made was twofold: first, the derivation of the math is actually quite simple to understand. All the derivations for the code implemented in the Rotor structs in this library are written out in the derivations folder of the GitHub repo; I derived them manually as part of the implementation.

On the other hand, Quaternions are often basically just seen as black boxes that we programmers use to do rotations because they have some nice properties, but that we don’t really understand. You can use Rotors this same way, but you can also easily understand them. Second is that in some sense they can be seen as ‘more correct’ than Quaternions. Specifically, they facilitate a more proper understanding of rotation as being something that occurs within a plane rather than something that occurs around an axis, as it is generally thought. Finally, Rotors also generalize to 4 and even higher dimensions, and if someone wants to they could implement a Rotor4 which retains all the properties of a Rotor3/Quaternion but does rotation in 4 dimensions instead, something which simply is not possible to do with Quaternions.

If it’s missing something you need it to do, bug me on the GitHub issue tracker and/or Rust community discord server (I’m Fusha there) and I’ll try to add it for you, if I believe it fits with the vision of the lib :)

Re-exports

Modules

  • bivec
    Bivectors, i.e. oriented areas.
  • conversion
    Contains implementations to convert between UVec/IVec and Vec/DVec.
  • int
  • interp
    Interpolation on types for which it makes sense.
  • mat
    Square matrices.
  • projection
    Utility functions to create projection matrices.
  • rotor
    Rotors, i.e. constructs that describe and perform rotations.
  • transform
    Dedicated transformation types as the combination of primitives.
  • vec
    Vectors and points, i.e. directed line segments and locations.

Macros

Structs