Re: Who uses clapack?

From: Tino (tino52_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 12/10/04 

Date: 10 Dec 2004 08:45:08 -0800

Victor Eijkhout wrote:
> The authors of lapack/scalapack are starting to work on a new release
of
> these packages. One of the things we want to address is the sillyness
> that C users, instead of linking to the binaries of the Fortran
version,
> use an automatically translated C version.
>
> Therefore we'd like to know precisely what the reasons for this are.
>
> Naively one would say, compile the Fortran version, append an
underscore
> (when appropriate) to routine names, and just link those libraries to
> your object files.
>
> What are the gotchas, and what are the real stumbling blocks here?
> Please spell it out in as much detail as you can muster. This
situation
> really needs to improve.
>
> V.
> --
> email: lastname at cs utk edu
> homepage: www cs utk edu tilde lastname

As a person who used to use CLAPACK until I found it was just as easy
to link to the FORTRAN libs, I would dare say there are those who use
CLAPACK because they don't realize there are other alternatives. Also,
CLAPACK comes with the header file needed to use either the FORTRAN or
CLAPACK libraries, whereas if you download the pre-built libraries from
http://www.netlib.org/lapack/archives/, the header files are not
present. This is a small issue, but could be a problem for people who
are less familiar with the library structure or the semantics for
calling a FORTRAN library from C/C++. Just my thoughts...

On a slightly related note, is there any effort (or even thought) being
put into the development of a "standardized" C++ object-oriented LAPACK
library? Something to wrap around the BLAS and LAPACK, perhaps?
Best,
Ryan

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