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Re: gslclapack


I found this conversation a tad too abstract.

On Tue, Mar 28, 2006 at 05:30:07PM -0700, Gerard Jungman wrote:
>     I am hoping that the clapack standard
>     says something about this situation; after all, it
>     ought to be designed to work well with cblas.

I don't udnerstand. A google of clapack reveals things like 
http://www.netlib.org/clapack/

which seems no better than calling the fortran libs directly 
from c code. And the problem with this is, of course, that 

-- the fortran subroutine names are a bit too short and cryptic
-- the fortran calling convention is rather bizarre for C
   (see e.g. the ick at http://www.netlib.org/clapack/clapack.h)
-- the only decent documentation for the actual subroutine 
   arguments seems to exist only in the fortran code, making 
   it hard to read. :-( 

These seem to be the major probblems, right?

>   - We discussed creating a lapack interface, similar to the
>     blas interface. The basic limitation was lack of manpower
>     and some statements about the difficulty of dealing with
>     workspace allocation/management, which I did not understood
>     at the time, and still don't understand.

Right. This is part of what makes the existing fortran interfaces
nasty to use.

> If somebody dropped a working lapack interface on the table,
> I would certainly want to put it in GSL. It's a clear win.

I presume you mean "a C wrapper that solves the strange 
calling convention, documentiation and workspace problems". ?

--linas


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