Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Data-oriented Design and Fourier Transform

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For some time now I've been thinking about this whole data-oriented design/programming idea that, among others, BitSquid guys have been preaching. To put it simple, the idea is to have data and functions that operate on this data declared separately. So it's closer to functional programming than to standard object-oriented programming. On the other end we have the just-mentioned object-oriented design. In this case we have some sort of an object that stores its state (data) and has methods (functions) that operate on that data. This is a simplification but should give you the general idea of the concept.

I'm not going to go into details of how to code in data-oriented manner. I'm a very adept of this technique. What I want is to share with you some of my old code (2010-2011 or something) and its refactored counter-part (2015); refactored with data-oriented design in mind. How I see it.

The code consists mostly of a rather simple implementation of math and image library. There is also a sample that performs Discrete Fourier Transform using the image library.

fourier-old
The math library code is in math/include/blossom_math/ and math/src/.
The general image code is in common/include/blossom_common/image.hpp and common/src/image.cpp.
The sample's code is in samples/fourier/src/main.cpp. Also, the Fourier functions can be found here.

fourier-new
The math code is in include/math/ and src/math/.
The image code is in include/image/ and src/image/. Also, the Fourier functions are here.
The sample's code is in samples/fourier/src/main.cpp.

Both archives come with binaries (for Windows). In samples/fourier/data/ there is run.bat file that will run the sample and perform Fourier transform on selected image using specified filter.

Feel free to express what you think about my data-oriented understanding :).