Contributing to Mir libraries

[jmh530]

On Tuesday, 18 August 2026 at 13:18:17 UTC, Serg Gini wrote:
> On Tuesday, 18 August 2026 at 12:57:51 UTC, Iskaban10 wrote:
>> Hi everyone,
>>
>> I’m planning to submit a proposal for SAOC this year and 
>> wanted some feedback on my idea.
>>
>> I am interested in mathematics and optimization, and am 
>> thinking of expanding the Mir libraries. Looking at the 
>> repositories, it seems like these libraries aren't actively 
>> maintained at the moment.
>
> I think jmh530 is still maintaining it =)
>

I would distinguish between maintaining and actively adding new 
functionality. I don't have a lot of free time right now to add 
new functionality*, but I've been checking on things and pay 
attention to new issues or PRs.

mir-algorithm was still compiling for me back in February, so I 
see no reason why it wouldn't work fine now. There are some 
failures in the CI, but they were dependent on getting some 
things fixed in LDC, which I believe subsequently happened. So 
the test suite should pass more of the options now.

With respect to optimization, my recommendation would be to just 
use importC and bring in something like nlopt (or something 
else). Why reinvent the wheel? At one point I had a wrapper for 
nlpot, but I wrote it a number of years ago and haven't used it 
much since then). I can't recall using mir-optim. For that 
matter, I think there is scope in D for bringing in more 
numerical libraries with importC.

With respect to the path forward generally on mir, Ilya (@9il) 
was the driving force behind mir-algorithm. He continues to 
provide support, but he is not not adding new features and does 
not want any breaking changes. I think that the folks at Symmetry 
still make use of it, so you might want to reach out to someone 
who works with them to get a better sense of what they might 
need/want most.

*   The outstanding work I never got around to finishing for 
mir-stat was support for histograms and adding in blas support so 
that I could do multiple regression