Gaussian elimination in what context even? If your LA library supports generic types, it might work. But generally generic math operations are tricky to get right, because math often does things that from a pure physical perspective don't make a whole lot of sense / you run into trouble with too many competing types due to temporary multiplication / divisions etc (which is a big issue in any statically typed language, because your container (vector, matrix, tensor whatever) type is typically a single unit type!
kragen|2 years ago
if your static type system can't handle that, it can't handle unit types for basic linear algebra subroutines
V1ndaar|2 years ago
Nim allows you to do a lot, e.g. derivatives of a unitful expression with measurement errors [0]. But other aspects run into the reality of dealing with a static type system. For example in Measuremancer [1], the library handling measurements with uncertainties, each `Measurement` is a single generic `Measurement[T]`. Each measurement stores the derivatives for error propagation. Obviously the derivatives have different units. Now, we could make `Measurement` a two-fold generic, `Measurement[T, U]`, but that just makes things more unwieldy in practice, for not much gain.
Without rewriting a majority of existing code you will always run into trouble where your perfect unit type system will either break or you'll need to work around it anyway (e.g. calling into some C library for part of the code).
[0]: https://github.com/SciNim/astGrad#extra-fun
[1]: https://github.com/SciNim/Measuremancer/