Re: [ublas] GSL support

Subject: Re: [ublas] GSL support
From: Rutger ter Borg (rutger_at_[hidden])
Date: 2012-06-20 04:30:51

On 2012-06-05 17:16, Philipp Kraus wrote:
>
> I would ask you again, if there is any how-to or tutorial in which way I
> can
> create an interface / binding for the GSL calls. Can you send me some
> information for the automatic detection and the python app to parse the
> header files?
>
> Thanks
>
> Phil
>

The python apps are in libs/numeric/bindings/tools. There are two 
generators, blas_generator.py and lapack_generator.py. They require a 
couple of source packages to get up and running (look in the python 
files for lapack_src_dir etc.). I just wanted to test them against the 
latest Lapack version in Debian (3.4.1), but unfortunately the lapack 
sources have changed their commenting style quite drastically. This 
means the parser will have to be updated to handle the new formatting of 
comments. To good side is that it looks like it can be parsed by doxygen.

The generators collect API calls, group those on value type, and insert 
the appropriate bindings-traits and asserts to glue everything together, 
and finally write out a bunch of files.

In the python files you may find references to "level 0", "level 1", 
etc., these refer to

Level 0: detail namespace overloads
Level 1: classes calling those detail namespace overloads
Level 2: free functions calling the classes

Some code shared between BLAS and LAPACK ended up in netlib.py.

Any way, to get support for GSL up and running, and have it in similar 
style of the rest of the bindings, make sure you have the sources

$ cd tools
$ apt-get source gsl (or just download and unzip)

I see the GSL also provides a BLAS implementation; I guess we should add 
support for GSL backend to the BLAS generator. It is relatively 
straightforward to add this.

The parser should go through the entire gsl source code base, 
automatically collect information about the gsl_ API, group on value 
type, and write out some nice binding files.

I could help a bit more if you could provide an example handwritten 
binding to a GSL function, and

* what are the bindings supposed to automatically fill-in?
* what are the options to GSL (like upper etc. in BLAS)?
* should the FFT interface be compared with other backends and be taken 
apart?
* etc.

I hope this helps.

Cheers,

Rutger