Row-major vs Column-major confusion

Question

I\'ve been reading a lot about this, the more I read the more confused I get.

My understanding: In row-major rows are stored contiguously in memory, in column-major colu

Answer 1

Today there is no reason to use other then column-major order, there are several libraries that support it in c/c++ (eigen,armadillo,...). Furthermore column-major order is more natural, eg. pictures with [x,y,z] are stored slice by slice in file, this is column-major order. While in two dimension it may be confusing to choose better order, in higher dimension it is quite clear that column-major order is the only solution in many situation.

Authors of C created concept of arrays but perhaps they did not expect that somebody had used it as a matrices. I would be shocked myself if I saw how arrays are used in place where already everything was made up in fortran and column-major order. I think that row-major order is simply alternative to column-major order but only in situation where it is really needed (for now I don't know about any).

It is strangely that still someone creates library with row-major order. It is unnecessary waste of energy and time. I hope that one day everything will be column-major order and all confusions simply disappear.