GSL, FFI, GCL, Windows; was: find_root with bfloats

On 9/29/10, Raymond Toy <toy.raymond at gmail.com> wrote:

> You mean having maxima use gsl to implement special functions?
>
> This (and related) issues has come up before.  The main blocking point
> is that it doesn't work with all of the Lisps we currently support and
> gcl in particular since that is still the primary lisp for distribution.
>  (I think; I don't build distribution binaries.)

Well, the Windows binaries distributed from Sourceforge
are built with GCL. It's likely that the great majority of
Windows users are running the pre-built binaries.
But at this point we could use another Lisp for the Windows
binary. I think ECL and CCL are workable.

On *nix systems, a variety of Lisps are used, probably
including GCL but probably the majority are something else.
(I'm guessing here.)

Using CFFI to call C libraries doesn't rule out GCL entirely.
It just means that another interface (using GCL's own FFI)
has to be written (by whoever wants GCL + C libraries).

I don't have an environment to build Windows binaries for
Maxima so I can't promise to create some new ones
using another Lisp. Would anyone else like to volunteer?
We may have already had this conversation, if so I apologize
for the repetition.

best

Robert Dodier