Re: [geometry] order of arrays

This has come up before, but "column-major" and "row-major" are ambiguous
on their own, as the column-major ordering of a matrix is the same as the
row-major ordering of the transpose of that matrix, and different graphics
API conceptually have their matrices laid out differently (e.g. DOMMatrix
is one way[1] while CGAffineTransform in Quartz 2D is the other[2], but
since CGAffineTransformMake takes the elements in row-major order,
constructing the same 2d transform in each will end up having the same
order of arguments).

WebGL actually doesn't care which order you feed it matrices since all
multiplications with a matrix take place in shaders, and GLSL supports
matrix/vector multiplication on the left or right, so it's up to the author
to get the convention right. However, in the fixed-function days OpenGL did
care, and required the elements to come in the column-major ordering of the
form of matrix specified in DOMMatrix. That lightgl.js library actually
follows this and there's an explicit transpose before passing matrices into
WebGL[3]. Fun Usenet posts on this ambiguity and the root of OpenGL's
ordering here: [4].

Multiplying a matrix by a column-vector point on the right has mostly won
the day in the computer graphics world, and has always been relatively
standard in linear algebra courses, so accepting that and with the
conceptual matrix layout given explicitly in [1], then the current spec's
column-major enumeration is the ideal one for interoperating with WebGL.

Brendan

[1] http://dev.w3.org/fxtf/geometry/#DOMMatrix

[2]
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/graphicsimaging/reference/CGAffineTransform/Reference/reference.html
(see CGAffineTransformMake)

[3] https://github.com/evanw/lightgl.js/blob/master/src/shader.js#L166

[4] http://steve.hollasch.net/cgindex/math/matrix/column-vec.html




On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 11:13 PM, Rik Cabanier <cabanier@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 11, 2014 at 10:26 PM, Dirk Schulze <dschulze@adobe.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Jun 12, 2014, at 7:15 AM, Rik Cabanier <cabanier@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > All,
>> >
>> > the current spec says that arrays are in [1] column-major order, but it
>> seems that WebGL is in row-major order (ie [2]).
>> > Can people confirm this? If so, maybe we should update the spec to
>> match.
>>
>> The spec aims to match CSS Transforms which is column-major order[1]. CSS
>> Transforms is also the reason why the indices on the matrix elements seem
>> to be the wrong way around… at least compared to mathematical conventions.
>>
>> It is indeed the question what will be used more. Maybe we can add an
>> enumeration enum DOMMatrixOrder { ‘column’, ‘row’ } as argument for
>> constructor, getters and setters? What would be the default, still ‘column'?
>>
>
> Well, if CSS already specified it in column order, we should just offer
> that.
> It's easy enough to swap the elements yourself. Maybe this should be a
> note in the spec?
>
>
>> [1] http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-transforms/#funcdef-matrix3d
>>
>> >
>> > 1:
>> http://dev.w3.org/fxtf/geometry/#dom-dommatrixreadonly-tofloat32array
>> > 2: https://github.com/evanw/lightgl.js/blob/master/src/matrix.js
>>
>>
>