[SciPy-user] Mac OS X question: using Apple's vecLib

[Pearu Peterson]

On Thu, 14 Nov 2002, Andrew Straw wrote:

> It appears that Apple has given Mac OS X (10.2) a pre-installed LAPACK 
> in the vecLib framework.  (See 
> http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/ReleaseNotes/vecLib.html )  
> Apparently, this is a c version of the library (clapack).
> 
> Is there any reason why scipy shouldn't use the clapack installed with 
> Mac OS X 10.2 rather than ATLAS/LAPACK installed from sources as 
> suggested in the scipy docs?

The only reason is that ATLAS/LAPACK would be upto 10 times faster than
CLAPACK.

> If not, I may try to create a patch for scipy to use Apple's 
> pre-installed library.

Though I would recommend getting ATLAS/LAPACK to work on Mac OS X as
the patch for CLAPACK may not be trivial, mostly because "there is a
difference in the definition of a two-dimensional array in Fortran and
C". This requires that all 2-dimensional arguments in linalg/lapack.pyf
must have intent(c) attribute. Adding these attributes is simple but
detecting when this attribute is acctually needed, is probably not.

Pearu