On Wed, Jul 16, 2008 at 5:04 PM, David Bateman <address@hidden> wrote:
Jaroslav Hajek wrote:
I see, however, a couple drawbacks:
1. most of GSL uses hard-coded double as the real type. Now that we
have true single precision, this is really a big drawback. I don't
reckon there are plans to change this state in GSL. And I can't see
any good way out of this.
2. the "core" linear algebra operation of the MINPACK algorithms
(trust-region Levenberg-Marquardt and Powell's hybrid method) is the
QRP factorization. GSL has its own QRP code (as well as other linear
algebra codes) and employs it here. I think, however, that LAPACK is
fairly better.
To me these are both good reasons not to use GSL. What I thought we were
gaining with GSL was
* upto date and maintained code
* code that generally performed better
* code that returned valid results for a wider range of input values.
Though given the two points above I'm not sure GSL is worth it.
I guess one option is to lift the relevant code from GSL and adapt
it for octave data type and lapack. I think it is still better than carry
along the old Fortran code.