Re: [ublas] Snapshot 20081116

Subject: Re: [ublas] Snapshot 20081116
From: Thomas Klimpel (Thomas.Klimpel_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-11-22 11:50:11

Hello Rutger,

Rutger ter Borg wrote:
> I was just wondering, wouldn't it be time to pitch the numeric bindings
> library as a Boost Library on its own, not necessarily tied to uBLAS?

Do you mean you would be interested to participate in an effort to pitch the numeric bindings library as a Boost Library on its own? I guess your contributions would be most welcome :-)

Or do you just want to know about the plans to move forward with the numeric bindings library? I guess the long term plan is indeed to get the numeric bindings library accepted as a "true" boost library. For the short term, I think it is more important to address the "backlog", i.e. review and integrate existing user patches (and add tests for the corresponding functionality) and add badly missing functionality (like full support for 64-bit platforms).

A mid term goal would be to have a proper release of the numeric bindings library, together with clear statements about supported functionality, missing functionality, tested configurations, configurations that are expected to work and configurations that aren't expected to work.

Karl Meerbergen wrote something about the status of the numeric bindings library in
http://lists.boost.org/MailArchives/ublas/2007/06/2166.php
I guess the mentioned "kind of manual" is the following report
http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/publicaties/rapporten/tw/TW506.abs.html 

Another direction of development concerns semi-automatic generation of the source-code for the bindings. The attached python-script tries to interpret fortran source files from lapack-3.1.1/SRC, in order to generate some of the required boiler-plate code. The script is still far from being able to parse every file in lapack-3.1.1/SRC, but someday... It is also not yet able to generate template code, but having the prototypes and inline functions is also not bad. And someday...

> I think it is one of the more useful libraries, and I don't seem to be the only one,
> given the amount of traffic on this list regarding this subject.

I don't quite follow what you want to say here. It's no surprise that some users of uBLAS will need functionality like eigenvector computations, and will therefore be forced to use the numeric bindings library. The numeric bindings library on the other hand is most often used via uBLAS, so it's only natural that it uses the ublas mailing list.

Regards,
Thomas