[Liboil] Packed data formats.

[Robert Scott]

Hi all,

I was wondering what peoples attitudes were to adding functions for dealing 
with packed/interleaved data formats to liboil.

Of course, I understand that this effectively doubles alignment issues (in 
some cases, quadruples them), but the reason I ask is that I've been working 
recently with a few libraries that are very keen on their interleaved data 
and, naturally, I've been building a few SIMD inner loops for dealing with 
them.

The two examples I'll cite are fftw, which interleaves its real and imaginary 
data*, and opengl's vertex arrays and vertex buffer objects, which deals with 
interleaved vertex coordinates.

For these two reasons alone, I'd argue that it would be good to include at 
least a few conversion/packing/unpacking routines in liboil.

Thoughts? Is this wanted/not wanted?


robert.


* Some hypot routines come in very useful for complex numbers.