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"

Looks like Fortran is finally on the way out !

[Anton Anatopopov]

I am pleased that the scientific community now has a powerful object oriented library of scientific functions.

Perhaps now scientific programmers can fully leverage object oriented design instead of relying on fortran libraries from the 70s!

Re:Looks like Fortran is finally on the way out !

[selectspec]

Not so sure about that. These methods are written entirely in C with no assembly. That means it would be nearly impossible to pace with FORTRAN for certain operations. The accomplishment is impressive here, and I think the GSL is really cool. However, I'd like to see some asm optimizations for just a few platforms, so we can finaly put FORTRAN in the grave.

Re:Looks like Fortran is finally on the way out !

[joib]

Umm, actually GSL uses BLAS. There are many optimized BLAS implementations written in assembler out there.
Disclaimer: I have never used GSL, I just read what their webpage says.

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.

Re:About scientific computing and fortran...

[Plagued by Penguins]

... especially since high quality stable fortran 95 compilers are available for most platforms (but no free ones :( ).

Doesn't Intel's free (as in beer) ifc [intel.com] compiler do f95 (and OpenMP)?

If I had had this when ...

[dreamsinter]

I was needing a scientific library earlier on in the peace!!! "Numerical Recipes" was too expensive - cashwise - and way too highly priced for my intended use of Mathematical Libraries for a TCAS plus Aeronautical Navigation software (GPL'ed).(You know, spherical trig. plus vectors, etc.)

And GSL is written in C - excellent!!! A lot easier to interface it to the likes of GNATS, and so forth.