Hi to all, 1. Is anyone out there using GSL besides me? :-)
A *lot* of people in the astronomy/astrophysics community, it is rather hard to list everyone. It should also not be overlooked how important is the source code of GSL: I've learnt a lot of things for good programming techniques from GSL code. 2. What functionality would you like to see added to GSL? a. Boundary value problems for partial differential equations. b. I know it is too much to ask, but I'd love to see a c++ implementation of GSL (not just a wrapper), something like Eigen/boost - style. c. Markov Chain Monte Carlo parameter estimation, with various methods (e.g. Hamiltonian monte carlo, Population mcmc etc). d. I am not happy with the performance of the numerical integration routines, they are generally way too slow (by the way, I've never managed to make the Gauss-Legendre quadrature to work properly). The most reliable I've found is the CQUAD. In comparison, see http://www.holoborodko.com/pavel/numerical-methods/numerical-integration/ from Pavel Holoborodko for fast GL quadratures. Again for comparison only, Numerical recipes is also a lot faster (not as reliable though). 3. Are you willing to develop and contribute the features you want? I am afraid I do not meet the standards of GSL, and I do not have time to study and become proficient in C - style. Am more than happy to contribute in C++ style code. I have a b-spline c++ class, and based on that some b-spline solvers for a restricted class of boundary value problems. I am also preparing (slowly) an mcmc implementation for population mcmc methods. 4. Would you like to see a quick release of GSL v2.0, or are you content to work off the git repository? yes Regards, Foivos On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 3:17 AM, Patrick Alken <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > There is significant new capability in GSL now for regularized linear > least squares problems. I've added routines to do L-curve analysis as well > as handle non-square Tikhonov regularization matrices. For those of you who > have large least squares problems (ie: millions of rows in your matrix) > stay tuned, as I'm working on adding some functionality for such problems. > > I've updated the GSL webpages on gnu.org to the latest in the git > repository, since many new features have been added since the last 1.16 > release. The main page also now recommends to install GSL from the git, > since 1.16 is quite outdated. This brings me again to the discussion of the > next release of GSL. > > The last discussion of GSL v2.0 was in June 2014 (time goes too > quickly!). I would like to reopen this discussion. The main points back > then holding up v2.0 were: > > 1. New memory management (redesign of all GSL containers) > 2. Incorporating LAPACK/LAPACKE/libflame > > As far as I know, nothing has been done on either of these points, however > a great deal of new functionality has been added to GSL in the meantime > (sparse matrices, regularized least squares, running statistics, 2D > interpolation, monotonic interpolation, new nonlinear least squares > solver). I think (as I stated last year) that points 1 and 2 should be > postponed for GSL v3.0, and we should release v2.0 soon. At this point I am > willing to make an executive decision and just do it :-) but I would like > to check in with everyone first. > > Over the past 2 years or so, looking at the git logs, I've been (mainly) > the only person adding code to GSL. So I'd like to ask some poll questions > (and recruit talented people to work on things) and so I'm posting to > help-gsl as well. Here are some questions: > > 1. Is anyone out there using GSL besides me? :-) > > 2. What functionality would you like to see added to GSL? > > 3. Are you willing to develop and contribute the features you want? > > 4. Would you like to see a quick release of GSL v2.0, or are you content > to work off the git repository? > > Thanks, > Patrick > >
