GSL 1.0 Released

Jacek writes "Looks like GSL 1.0 is finally out! Look here. I've been using it in my research for the las few years and I really liked it! Thanks to all developers for the great job! Jacek"

Not object-oriented

[masakatsu]

Although this accomplishment is very impressive, I'm just wondering if GSL is better than fortran libraries.

I'd like to use a library with object-oriented design like those in OON [oonumerics.org]. Since GSL is written in C, it would not help object-oriented programming style.

About scientific computing and fortran...

[joib]

While this is quite cool, I'd rather have something similar written in C++. The problem as I see it, plain C doesn't really offer enough benefits to make the switch from fortran, especially since high quality stable fortran 95 compilers are available for most platforms (but no free ones :( ). But C++, with operator overloading and templates, has what it takes. With C++, you can write shorter code, which actually resembles the mathematical problem, being much more high level. Thus reducing the amount of bugs, which is very important as your calculations are of little value if they are wrong. And you don't have to trade any performance for that. See the papers on expression templates by Todd Veldhuizen, and the book "Modern C++ Design" by Andrei Alexandrescu if you're interrested. That said, I think I'll find gsl useful for quite a lot of stuff anyway, except linear algebra. For that I'd prefer an object-oriented LAPACK wrapper like linal or the one described in the barton & nackman book. There are also a couple of interresting linear algebra libraries being developed from scratch in c++, but I don't know if they can be trusted yet.