[SciPy-Dev] Bundling Boost?

[David Warde-Farley]

On Sun, Oct 7, 2012 at 11:40 AM, Pauli Virtanen <pav at iki.fi> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'd like to consider replacing some of the function implementations in
> scipy.special with versions from the C++ Boost library, cf.
> http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_51_0/libs/math/doc/sf_and_dist/html/index.html
>
> The reason is that these implementations appear to be made with more
> care than what we use currently, and behave more correctly in corner
> cases (cf. e.g. ticket #1740).
>
> To minimize work, it would be useful just to use the Boost functions
> direcly, rather than doing manual C transcriptions. The drawback here is
> that the portion of Boost library required weights about 8 MB of source
> code, and we would most likely like to bundle it, as it is not really a
> standard part of many installations. This does not reflect much on the
> compiled binary size, however.
>
> I'm not 100 % certain about the compiler support. Perhaps C++ is already
> mature enough to work across the platforms we care about.
>
> I'm not aware of many good BSD-compatible floating-point special
> function libraries, so if you know others, or would be opposed to
> bundling Boost, please chime up!

At SciPy2011 a few of us managed to convince Andreas Klöckner to
bundle the necessary bits of boost with PyCUDA so as to remove a
dependency and grow the user-base. I recall this causing trouble for
some segment of his users that had boost installed on the system, but
I don't know the details.

Andreas (CCed): Do you remember what problems those were? Fred B. told
me about it over lunch one day but I can't recall what exactly went
wrong.

David