Is Operator Overloading Really Needed? | Tsoding

Tsoding shares his opinion on operator overloading in modern languages.

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[TsodingHighlights]

This video is from the stream where he was trying the C3 programing language which is a C-like language. It do not have operator overloading and has built-in vector types with swizzling.

[fluxter]

Operator overloading is an absolute blessing for scienfic libraries and ml frameworks. One of the reasons python is so popular in ML and AI space. I mean java also has ml libraries, but it is an absolute pain when you have to implement complex algorithms. In python and C++, it is as easy as copying math equations.

[rupen]

I'm a mathematician. No language developer is going to exhaustively handle our mathematical "data types" (algebraic structures). A lot of the time we're dealing with things non-mathematicians wouldn't even call numbers. But it's just as nice to be able to overload operators for those as on vectors and matrices. Just let us extend the language instead of having to fork it or deal with specialized software written 35 years ago.

Not saying every language must have it, but it is a useful feature and some languages should have it.

[vapandris]

Dude still not tried Odin. And he's talking about Odin 😂

[krisdabrowski]

Odin technically not mentioned, but implied.

[ovi]

It's hard to standardize matricies tho. Or to go further - tensors. Should they be stored column-wise or row-wise? Do we support up to 4x4 matricies for graphics people or arbitrarily sized ones for ai people? If latter should they require an allocator? What about the ownership?

Like operator overloading is not ideal but at least you don't have to attempt to solve a one-size-fits-all solution for matricies. If you're making a systems programming language - but you could add numpy matricies to standard js and it'd fit perfectly.

[taylorallred]

Odin showed me that all we really need operator overloading for is composite mathematical types and all we need preprocessor macros for is conditional compilation. It’s people abusing these features in other languages that make them look bad.

[mattiasamiolo]

I mean, I do agree. In Julia tough, it all go around this concept... And it works in very understandable way

[mskiptr]

Easy solution: if your want to overload +, -, * and /, you have to prove that your type forms a field. /j

[asbestos]

numpy be like
sure who needs operators, mat.add(mat) sounds delicious

[Gruak]

Why all the comments are about this odin thing? Have anyone even used it production?

[arkeynserhayn]

What an IQ 145+ W take.

This makes it trivial to implement assembly vector operations on datatypes that actually need them.

[stefanalecu]

Half of this comment section is Odin bots

[einargs]

Haskell's operators are actually very principled; if you want the same operator to work on two different types, there needs to be a common interface. Haskell has no actual function or operator overloading, just the ability to define new operators.

[Daniel_Zhu_af]

it's more of a Haskell problem than an operator problem, eg Julia has a lot of operators + macros that can locally modify operators but is not nearly as confusing.

[mkwpaul]

I feel like the value operator overloading can bring heavily outweighs the costs of people misusing it.
I do agree that it should be more restrictive than what C++ allows, but why should I not be able to provide custom equality or comparion (>, >=, < =<) operators for my own types?

[aedd]

GingerBill (the creator of odin) said the same thing

[Whatthetrash]

*clears throat* Ahem... Odin mentioned! :)

[MCorange]

imo rust way of using traits for like *everything* is probbably my favorite way of implementing matrix math, plus you cant (or well atleast its hard to) turn that into an implicit nightmare

[CrazyWinner]

Operator overloading is a pretty useful imo. Stupid people will always find ways to make everything terrible. We need to educate people instead of removing a cool feature.