[Help-gsl] Re: sparse matrices (again)

[Rodney Sparapani]

Brian Gough wrote:
> At Wed, 25 Apr 2007 00:30:25 +0400,
> Andrew Makhorin wrote:
> > I am wondering if it is planned to eventually provide GSL with general
> > sparse matrix routines (e.g. like those ones which are included in NAG,
> > ESSL, or Harwell Library)?
>
> Thanks for your email.  
>
> So far we haven't added sparse matrices because it seemed like
> this would require several sparse matrix representations to be
> implemented in order to be useful, each with their own functions.
>
> Due to the potentially large amount of work involved, it seemed
> like this was best left to specialised sparse matrix packages.
> As I understand it the number of sparse functions in the NAG
> library is pretty big.
>
> If you have any suggestions in this area I'd be glad to hear
> them.

Well, my thoughts are mixed if anyone wants to read them.  I view
this area as beyond GSL.  But, before I would recommend NAG (which
my center cannot afford), I'd like to see GSL recommend some free 
software like TAUCS http://www.tau.ac.il/~stoledo/taucs/ or others
that were mentioned in this thread.  This is similar to the way GSL 
recommends FFTW.  I remember you saying that GSL only recommends
free operating systems rather than open source ones like Mac OS X
or OpenSolaris (if you didn't already guess, these are my development 
platforms).  So, let's not have double standards.

Rodney