search

mmottl / gsl-ocaml

OCaml bindings to the GSL (GNU Scientific Library).
Other
36 stars 10 forks source link

coverage info? #7

Closed nilsbecker closed 9 years ago

nilsbecker commented 9 years ago

It would be good to advertise what of gsl is not covered in some way. I found out after a while that 2d histograms are apparently not included.

mmottl commented 9 years ago

The GSL API will surely keep growing over time. This means that someone would have to continuously monitor what is being added there and update documentation on what's not covered by the OCaml bindings. A lot of GSL-features are quite arcane to the vast majority of users so there would be a lot of work just documenting missing features that nobody is using anyway.

Unless a volunteer is willing to do that, I think it's best to just let people run into missing features (rare enough) and either provide a patch (preferred) or add a feature request here on GitHub.

nilsbecker commented 9 years ago

fair enough; maybe a rough statement of what percentage is covered, somewhere in the readme? 75%? 95%?

mmottl commented 9 years ago

I'm not sure such a percentage would help anybody. If you need a feature that isn't there, the coverage is 0%, otherwise it's 100% :wink:

nilsbecker commented 9 years ago

let's say i want to decide if i want to start a new project in ocaml or another language. i expect to use gsl heavily, and i know what it provides in general, but i don't know yet what exact functions i will need. do i need to prepare for the case that the bindings do not cover a particular function i will need? i think it would be helpful to know at least that the bindings are not complete, and better, roughly how incomplete.

mmottl commented 9 years ago

Pretty much all bindings for anything are incomplete, and "sufficient" completeness always depends on your needs. Lets say I told you that 99% of GSL were covered (whatever that means). If you need functionality from the missing 1%, the percentage wouldn't help you. If I told you that only 30% were implemented, but it covers what you need, who cares?

I guess what you actually want to know is the probability that your chosen tools will be good enough for the job. This depends a lot more on what problem you want to solve than anything else.

foretspaisibles commented 9 years ago

@nilsbecker For me that information is nicely enough conveyed by the omcaldoc generated documentation.