What's the status of this project? about specialfunctions.jl

[simonbyrne]

I think you can also email support, and they can switch it to a normal repository.

[tkelman]

This Fortran code is from openspecfun. The point of this would be to finish cleaning this up, add tests, docs, etc to the pure Julia code then verify that it's close enough in performance to the Fortran in openspecfun that we could remove openspecfun as a build dependency of Julia.

I don't think Faddeeva is all that widely used or important, but if it is we could translate some of it to Julia or use BinDeps only for Faddeeva.

[ararslan]

Okay, that makes sense. Thanks for the explanation!

[ararslan]

@tkelman Hm, but if SpecialFunctions is being separated out from Base, why couldn't openspecfun be a build dependency for this package once it's removed from Base? I guess I'm failing to see why porting it to Julia is necessary.

[tkelman]

Fortran dependencies are kind of a pain, and since most of the porting has already been done and performance was reported to be good, removing the trouble of binaries (and I disagree with "well maintained," nobody touches that fortran code) in favor of a pure-Julia replacement is worth the small amount of cleanup that would be needed to finish up here. It's not urgent, but openspecfun doesn't really need to exist long-term. This would be replacing the largest and most inconvenient part of it, the Fortran code.

[ararslan]

Out of curiosity, what makes Fortran dependencies a pain? Does gfortran do name mangling or something?

[tkelman]

gfortran's name mangling is relatively simple to predict, but it forces you to link to gcc runtimes which isn't the platform compiler anywhere other than Linux (and not even every distribution any more), gfortran isn't installed everywhere and it's GPL licensed, Intel's Fortran compiler is better but not free and not always compatible, etc. And all the annoying distribution headaches you inherit with C libraries, just worse.

[ararslan]

Port to Julia it is, then!

[ararslan]

@tkelman Should we have GitHub separate this as its own repo rather than keep it as a fork of nolta's? If nothing else it'd be nice to be able to search, which isn't possible for forks for whatever reason.

[tkelman]

I guess we could do that. Could also delete this one, create a new empty repo then git push a clone into it. That wouldn't show up as a fork but would delete this issue.

[ararslan]

@simonbyrne Yeah, that's what I meant. That seems like a good idea to me.

I'd also be fine with @tkelman's suggestion to push to a new repo. I personally wouldn't mind this issue being erased from history though I suppose it's nice to have for backstory/reference/etc.

[ararslan]

I'd be in favor of having support convert this fork to a normal repo. If you guys agree then I can go ahead and email them, otherwise I'm fine with whatever.

[tkelman]

I don't mind if you want to do that.

[ararslan]

The deed is done.