[ruby-core:65639] Re: [ruby-trunk - Feature #10225] [PATCH] *math.c: New method Math.normcdf

On Oct 11, 2014, at 11:18 PM, [e-mail] wrote:

> Sorry for my late. It's hard to say but.. ruby-gsl doesn't look good enough.

I agree that ruby-gsl has its shortcomings.  GSL is a fairly large library that provides lots of functionality.  Exposing all that functionality to Ruby is no small task.  Another issue is memory management; I don't think GSL provides a way to hook into its memory allocation so that creates some issues.

> And I suppose we'd better to make such a library from scratch.
> 
> (Actually I start to make other library(called Numrb)
> 
> Aside from that, I believe that providing such a feature "as standard" is really important in terms of reliability.

I think I prefer a sort of middle ground.  I'd like some sort of "standard", built-in way of dealing with multidimensional numerical arrays.  I do not think we need to include loads of functionality out of the box, but it would be nice to have a standard multidimensional numerical array data type that different Ruby extensions could be created around.  IMHO, this would provide a nice modular approach so that things can evolve with a finer granularity.  It would somewhat decouple the numerical algorithms from the underlying data structures as well as provide for better interoperability between the different extensions that use multidimensional numerical arrays.

> And we can make people we couldn't reach so far have interest in Ruby.

It's always nice to broaden the appeal of Ruby!