A gentle critque..

[Paulo Herrera]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Don Clugston wrote:
> 
>>> About native libraries
>>> ----------------------
>>> I think the way to go is to create QUALITY native D libraries. I 
>>> think we usually overestimate the cost of porting/developing native 
>>> libraries.
>>
>> I agree. When porting a library
>> (a) there isn't any algorithm development (not much 'thinking' time 
>> required);
>> (b) it's very easy to test (you can run test cases against the 
>> original version);
>> (c) the D version is frequently greatly superior to the original.
> 
> Hmm. Is there a 'canonical' Fortran numerics library with a solid test 
> suite that could be translated to D as a showcase project?

Do you have some idea in mind?

For my work I need a good iterative (or fast sparse) linear solver. I 
used the Fortran SPARSKIT library in the past 
(http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~saad/software/SPARSKIT/sparskit.html), but 
  I found much more comprehensive libraries in other languages.

For example, the MTJ Java library (http://rs.cipr.uib.no/mtj/. That is a 
very complete linear algebra library with dense and sparse matrix and 
vectors, and direct and iterative solvers. The library is very well 
designed and organized. Unfortunately, the performance of the pure Java 
version is not so good (see http://rs.cipr.uib.no/mtj/benchmark.html). 
MTJ can use native CBLAS and LAPACK, but that requires to "convince" 
Java to use those libraries (another example of problems with the use of 
different languages).

If we can make a port of that library to D and show that it performs 
close to  SPARSKIT, that would be a good demonstration of D capabilities 
for numerical computing.

Paulo.