-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Review] ODEint review Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2012 22:56:56 +0200 From: André Bergner <andre.bergner.0@gmail.com> To: boost@lists.boost.org CC: watanabesj@gmail.com === ODEINT REVIEW === I vote for 'YES'. The library ODEint should be accepted and integrated into boost. Boost features many scientific/numeric applications already. Differential equations are fundamental enough to be added to boost's math/numeric category and enhance the scientific use cases of boost. _____________________________________________ What is your evaluation of the design? ODEint features a modern C++ (concept based as opposed to of polymorphism) which improves performance and flexibility tremendously. It demonstrates very well the power of a functional programming style - algorithms and containers are separated strictly. In particular parallelization comes almost for free by 'just' changing the container type. This is one very nice feature I like a lot. The design allows inter-portability to a great extend. Pretty much everything can be exchanged and adapted to specific needs. _____________________________________________ What is your evaluation of the implementation? I did not dive into all the internals deeply. But from what I've seen ODEint is well implemented and its internal structure make sense. Here the well designed interface helps the internals to be structured clearly as well. _____________________________________________ What is your evaluation of the documentation? The documentation is pretty good. It is covering many use-cases in detail and demonstrates the high flexibility of ODEint (CUDE/thrust, etc.) with many examples (missing a lot in some other boost libs). It becomes clear how it is used and what can be done with it. Nevertheless, for somebody not familiar with the topic of differential equations the purpose of the library is unclear from a quick glance into the overview. I would extend the overview with a short introduction (one or two paragraphs, links to wikipedia) of the topic, especially with some demonstrative example in words (e.g. physics engine in computer games or something similar). Concerning a more technical detail of the lib, I would like to have one large html file instead of many linked small ones. This would improve reading and in particular searching a lot. Btw., this is also true for many other boost libraries. I miss some notes about ODEint and C++11 (e.g. some obvious such as lambda should be mentioned, what about literals as units). Further, from a mathematical point of view also some comments about the application to partial differential equations would be useful. For somebody with experience in the field this might be obvious but for a beginner this would be helpful. _____________________________________________ What is your evaluation of the potential usefulness of the library? ODEint has many applications in a huge amount of scientific and engineering fields. It has the potential to become the de-facto standard for solving ODEs and high performance computing. Further, some less obvious use-cases might be: particle systems (quite popular in entertainment apps these days), network layout algorithm, etc... Within its field of application this library is very feature complete and can compete with many standard libs (matlab, python, ...) with ease. I think that ODEint makes the best compromise between simplicity in use and computational performance while not giving up general flexibility. It also features many things (error correction, symplectic methods, ...) not present in many competing libraries. _____________________________________________ Did you try to use the library? With what compiler? Did you have any problems? I was using the library for quite some time with several compilers (gnu, clang, intel). _____________________________________________ How much effort did you put into your evaluation? A glance? A quick reading? In-depth study? I was using the library one year age intensively. However, within this year I was not using it due to a different working field of mine. But I was following its improvements. _____________________________________________ Are you knowledgeable about the problem domain? Yes, I used the library extensively. I was successfully combining it with boost::graph to integrate network of coupled differential equations. Best regards, --- André Bergner