[SciPy-dev] Do we care about the LAPACK C interface?

[Travis E. Oliphant]

Robert Kern wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 17:27, Travis E. Oliphant <oliphant at enthought.com> wrote:
>   
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I'm sitting here in a BOF with Clint Whaley (the author of ATLAS).  He
>> is looking for information about people that care about the C interface
>> to LAPACK.  Do we care?
>>
>> I'm not clear on that.  Don't we just use the FORTRAN interfaces to ATLAS?
>>
>> If I hear from you soon, I can give Clint the information before I leave
>> the BOF.
>>     
>
> Query: Are you talking about just the C interface to LAPACK or the C
> interface to the BLAS, too? I definitely want to keep the BLAS C
> interface. It would be nice if there were a C interface to the entire
> LAPACK, but I don't think that ATLAS (or anyone else) provides that
> currently. That way, we would be able to worry less about mixing and
> matching Fortran compilers (e.g. your distro builds ATLAS's LAPACK
> with g77 and you want to use gfortran to build scipy). But since
> ATLAS's LAPACK is a mixture of C and FORTRAN, I think we may be pretty
> much stuck with that problem regardless.
>   

Clint Whaley has written some more C interfaces to LAPACK and was 
wondering if anybody cared (or if he should stop doing it).   It sounds 
like we should let him know that his efforts in this direction are 
useful to us.

-Travis