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janverschelde / PHCpack

The primary source code repository for PHCpack, a software package to solve polynomial systems with homotopy continuation methods.
http://www.phcpack.org
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Julia wrappers #3

Open berceanu opened 10 years ago

berceanu commented 10 years ago

It would be nice to have wrappers for the Julia language (http://julialang.org). Is anyone actively working on it or is it at least a planned feature? Calling C code from Julia is supposed to be straight-forward, there is no need to generate any interface routines.

janverschelde commented 10 years ago

Having wrappers for the Julia language would indeed be nice. As far as I know nobody is working on this. Personally I do not have plans for such interface -- at least not in the immediate future -- but building the wrappers is open to anybody who has the skills and the need for this interface.

berceanu commented 10 years ago

In order to proceed with the creation of a Julia package for PHCpack, we need your approval to distribute PHCpack under the MIT license instead of GPL, would that be a problem?

janverschelde commented 10 years ago

The problem could be that the blackbox solver of PHCpack uses for its mixed volume computation an Ada translation of MixedVol, released under the GPL license by Tangan Gao, T.Y. Li, Li Xing, and Mengnien Wu. As the Ada translation follows closely the logic of the original code and thus borrows heavily from the intellectual property of the original authors, I think I may not re-license that code.

berceanu commented 10 years ago

It seems that it will be OK to include the Ada code with its GPL license in Julia, since it will be a separate package. Now we have a practical question. I myself use Linux, where the GNAT compiler is part of GCC and therefore very easy to install. But if we were to re-distribute your code, we need an easy way to be able to compile it on Homebrew for Mac users and also on Windows. Do you know of a standard way to install GNAT on these platforms?

janverschelde commented 10 years ago

Free binary versions for Mac and Windows of the gnu-ada compiler are available at http://libre.adacore.com/ and are very easy to install.

darkestkhan commented 9 years ago

There is also tdm-gcc ( http://tdm-gcc.tdragon.net/ ) - it provides [at least] gcc, g++ and gnat for win32 and win64.