Re: [Help-gsl] Linear least squares, webpages and the next release

[Arun Isaac]

> 1. Is anyone out there using GSL besides me? :-)

Yeah, sure. I am a grad student and I use GSL for my research. I prefer
GSL over other libraries and really want to see it become a well
established and popular library for numerical computation.

> 2. What functionality would you like to see added to GSL?

I would like to see better support for complex functions. In particular,
I need bessel functions which can take complex arguments and return
complex results.

Also, support for the C99 complex type would be highly desirable. The
gsl_complex type is really quite unwieldy when expressing large
arithmetic expressions. FFTW style integration with the C99 complex type
would be worth emulating.

http://www.fftw.org/doc/Complex-numbers.html

> 3. Are you willing to develop and contribute the features you want?

Yes, definitely. I have code for calculating a few bessel functions (Jn,
Y0, H01) with complex arguments. I also have a routine for romberg
numerical integration which operates on functions with complex arguments
and complex results. I would happily contribute these routines to GSL. I
haven't done yet because I wasn't quite sure how complex functions
fitted neatly into the rest of GSL. So, better integration with the C99
complex type is really important for me.

> 4. Would you like to see a quick release of GSL v2.0, or are you
> content to work off the git repository?

I think a quick release is good. Going for years on end without a
release makes the project look inactive. It'll be good if we had more
frequent releases (say once a year, or twice a year).

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