Sol is a fast, maintainable, and portable vector library written in C.

Nim bindings are provided "out of the box" for those who don't want to deal with C's memory management or lack of high level features, but still want to enjoy the speed benefits Sol provides.

This is a hobbyist project. Please don't use this for production-level code until further notice.

Here are some basic examples for C and Nim, using Sol bundled into the current directory.

// Native C11 Example
#include "sol/sol.h"

int main() {
  Vec3 a = vec3_init(0, 1, 2);
  Vec3 b = vec3_init(2, 1, 0);
  Vec3 c = vec3_cross(a, b);
  vec3_print(c);
  return 0;
}

# Nim Binding Example
import sol/sol

var a = vec3_init(0, 1, 2)
var b = vec3_init(2, 1, 0)
var c = vec3_cross(a, b)
vec3_print(c)

C is well-known for being a "fast" language, not because the language spec itself somehow makes it fast, but because the cost of low-level operations is well-displayed to the programmer and because of compiler maturity and ready availability of intrinsics without any sort of linking overhead.

For these reasons, C was chosen.

Although it may seem antithetical to call C maintainable, C's lack of high level features to distract from optimization help avoid data-hiding antipatterns which are common in OOP code; using a higher-level language invites use of these antipatterns.

Instead of Sol's functions being interfaces for a class, they are just more streamlined and efficient SIMD-optimized versions of what the end programmer wants-- the way a library should be.

By using the target platform macros available in most modern C compilers, it is possible to discern wether or not the target platform supports a given intrinsic, and adjust the generated code accordingly.

Thanks to this, Sol can be made to use only standard C or to automatically adapt to the target platform.

Commentation is done before each function to help improve the readability of the library to newcomers. An example of this is shown below.

/// vec3_add ///
// Description
//   Adds the elements of two vectors.
// Arguments
//   a: vector (Vec3)
//   b: vector (Vec3)
// Returns
//   vector (Vec3) {a.xyz + b.xyz}

sol_inline
Vec3 vec3_add(Vec3 a, Vec3 b) {
  // etc.
}