Re: libflame version 4.0 announced

[Brian Gough <bjg at gnu dot org>]

At Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:37:31 -0700,
Gerard Jungman wrote:
> (2) The LAPACK-like coverage seems reasonable. But I am not a good
>     judge of this. How much LAPACK functionality is covered in
>     this latest release? Obviously all the banded-matrix stuff
>     is out, since libflame does nothing with banded matrices.
>     But how complete is it regarding core functionality?

The main omissions currently are eigenvalues and SVD.

However, since everything in FLAME is derived automatically from a
high-level description it should be easier for them to add new
algorithms in the long run.

The problems below are all fixable I am sure.

> (4) According to the manual, libflame calls abort() when it encounters
>     a problem. As I have discussed before, this is brain-damaged. It
>     makes it hard for other library developers (us) to integrate
>     their thing into an existing error-handling system. They seem
>     to admit it is a problem, but it's probably a low priority
>     for them. How can we integrate this?
> 
> (5) There are many configuration/build options. Is it feasible to
>     build and deploy several different versions (with and without
>     SuperMatrix, etc), from which a selection can be made at link
>     time, requiring no source-level changes in client code?


> (d) There are several places where the API assumes C stdio. It looks
>     like some of these uses are internal (like FLA_Print_message
>     being used for error messages). This is brain-damaged, since
>     it makes it harder to integrate into other environments
>     (i.e. C++) where C stdio is not appropriate. It's ok to
>     have such "convenience" functions in the API, but they
>     should not be used internally.
> 
> (e) The autotools build looks somewhat annoying. I'm really
>     tired of autotools. Obviously, the same is true of GSL.