Elements of Design for Containers and Solutions in the LinBox Library

TL;DR

This paper introduces new design techniques for the LinBox library, enhancing safety, usability, and efficiency in exact linear algebra computations through container simplification, a strategy pattern variation, and a benchmarking framework.

Contribution

It presents a simplified container structure, a novel controller-plugin strategy pattern, and a benchmarking architecture to improve LinBox's usability and performance.

Findings

Simplified container structure improves code clarity.

Controller-plugin pattern enables flexible algorithm selection.

Benchmark framework facilitates performance tuning and regression testing.

Abstract

We describe in this paper new design techniques used in the \cpp exact linear algebra library \linbox, intended to make the library safer and easier to use, while keeping it generic and efficient. First, we review the new simplified structure for containers, based on our \emph{founding scope allocation} model. We explain design choices and their impact on coding: unification of our matrix classes, clearer model for matrices and submatrices, \etc Then we present a variation of the \emph{strategy} design pattern that is comprised of a controller--plugin system: the controller (solution) chooses among plug-ins (algorithms) that always call back the controllers for subtasks. We give examples using the solution \mul. Finally we present a benchmark architecture that serves two purposes: Providing the user with easier ways to produce graphs; Creating a framework for automatically tuning the library and supporting regression testing.