Back in the game: Numerics in D

[Lars T. Kyllingstad]

dsimcha wrote:
> This sounds fantastic.  I and a few others (actually more than a few) around here
> are very interested in putting together a complete scientific library for D.  A
> few of the pieces are already in place.  Lars Kyllingstad has started a SciD
> project (http://www.dsource.org/projects/scid).  For now it's basically a nice
> wrapper around BLAS and LAPACK, but in the future we'd like to make more of it
> native D because using crufty FORTRAN code introduces some very arbitrary
> limitations and makes getting up and running with the library relatively difficult
> (as in, I haven't figured out how to build the thing on Windows yet.)

For the sake of correctness, I would just like to point out that those 
limitations (namely, only being able to use float and double, and not 
real or user-defined floating-point types) only applies to the parts 
SciD that uses LAPACK, i.e. the scid.linalg module.  The rest of SciD is 
native, templated D code.

That said, having to use LAPACK has become a major annoyance.  A native 
D linear algebra library is high on my wish list, but not something I 
have the time to write myself.

There is also, as dsimcha points out, the problem of getting BLAS and 
LAPACK up and running on Windows.  If anyone has experience with this, 
please speak up.  Unfortunately I don't have convenient access to a 
Windows computer myself, but I would very much like SciD to be as 
cross-platform as possible.  Any help with writing a Windows 
build/installation guide would be much appreciated.

-Lars