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Published 20 hours ago • verified publisher icon zdevito

Consider adding a nontrivial TensorRef type

Open ezyang opened this issue 6 years ago • 1 comments

Semantics are similar to const TensorImpl&.

Motivation:

  • It avoids passing const Tensor& which is technically a pointer to a pointer to the actual tensor
  • You can do const-correctness correctly on it (#27), because TensorRef would NOT support copy construction
  • It solves the problem mentioned in https://github.com/zdevito/ATen/pull/112/commits/9c05ed3b6c8096a9430cb2a4a09cfb144d4a5bf8

ezyang avatar Oct 20 '17 15:10 ezyang

I've considered this but until we see perf problems based on the current approach I don't want to do it. It adds complexity to the public API -- people need to understand more ATen concepts. API complexity is something that I strongly want to avoid because I think it has been what has caused people less comfortable with C++ to avoid using libraries like Eigen.

zdevito avatar Oct 20 '17 17:10 zdevito