Re: More on binary packages and FFTW/ATLAS

[Quentin Spencer]

Paul Kienzle wrote:

> > We could do something similar, where Octave would not actually be 
> > linked with a Lapack or Blas library, but would dlopen them and look 
> > up functions as needed (or at startup, to fill in a table) and then 
> > call the linear algebra functions via pointers.  This way, it would 
> > be easy to switch from one linear algebra package to another, perhaps 
> > even at run time if you really wanted to do that.  Should we make a 
> > change like this?
>
> I see this as more of an install time than a run time issue. No need 
> to complicate the code when the os runtime already supports finding 
> and loading dynamic libraries.

However, there's one argument for runtime detection I can think of. If 
octave and associated libraries are maintained centrally on a network 
file system for a group of users who may have different hardware types, 
it would be nice to have libraries available for all hardware types and 
have applications such as octave detect which one they should load.

Quentin



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