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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