Time for the once-a-month update to Sylvester, my JavaScript vector maths library. This release fixes some bugs to do with variables being passed by reference instead of value, and allows you to pass plain arrays to various Matrix methods as long as they are properly nested into rows and columns. If they take some other form, Matrix will attempt to convert them into matrix format as before; the difference is that it won’t bother converting to proper Matrix objects if it doesn’t need to, and this can speed things up significantly.

Progress on this has been a little slow given that I started this project nearly three months ago. The first release took a couple of weeks but progress after that slowed up as I realised I needed to optimise heavily if this library was going to do any computational geometry or graphics things fast enough. Also, a bunch of Rails projects and JavaScript UI stuff has cropped up since then to occupy my time. Life’s been a little hectic recently but hopefully I’ll be able to focus on this again soon.

And before anyone asks: yes, I know doing serious graphics in JavaScript is asking for trouble and poor performance. I’m doing this to teach myself a few things and find out what this language can do.