As before, I apologize for the flood of messages. But I figure better a few shorter messages than one long message with multiple sub-topics.
Here is another discussion that I found interesting: http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lib.gsl.general/4385 As usual, the details could be debated. But I found the following quote to be very telling: "Rhys, I did try to use views. They do not help because the gsl routines allocate vectors internally and there is not much that I can do about it... except for maybe hacking gsl and changing gsl_vector_alloc myself." People seem to be led to this conclusion from multiple directions. Another choice quote: "The other issue is: the implementation of gsl_vector just seems inefficient to me. Looking at the code, it seems like a single vector requires 3 calls to malloc and free (one for the data, one for the gsl_block, and one for the gsl_vector itself). The manual states that the block is there for "consistency", and I can see how memory management becomes easier with it. But it seems to be a case of generality at the expense of performance. Also, the stride and the owner flag are part of the gsl_vector object to make it work with gsl_views, but then people who never need views pay the performance price anyway."
