GNU Scientific Library

Recently, I spend some time in looking for libraries that can fasten my software development. The reason is simple, if I want to develop my software for example doing a common algorithm, I don't need to spend time for developing the algorithm which might not be optimized and unstable.

The fact is that many people out there who share the same need and they have already created a group for developing an open source softwares/libraries. The advantage of such a group is that many people evaluates the software and many people will criticize when there's a bug in the software while the others will contribute to resolve the bug. Quite wonderful right? You have a lot of bright people from around the world assisting you (not exaggerating but it's quite true..).

GNU Scientific Library provides some scientific calculation such as linear least squares, FFT, Linear Algebra, Numerical Differentiation, etc. You might want to see this website for the available routines provided by GSL. It helps you focus on your task and appreciate others who has contributed their time developing this library.

After spending the whole afternoon configuring my compiler to work with this library, got a lot of error messages which are discouraging, finally I found the library that has been ported into Windows platform here

Before using this library, the compiler has to be configured. The configuration includes setting the additional include path and the library path. After that your compiler is ready to use. My compiler is Borland C++ Builder, you need to convert the library into the Borland format instead of using Ms VC++ format (see my note about implib)

Finally, I tried this sample code from the documentation:

#include < stdio.h >

#include < gsl/gsl_sf_bessel.h >

int main (void)
{
double x = 5.0;
double y = gsl_sf_bessel_J0 (x);
printf ("J0(%g) = %.18e\n", x, y);
return 0;
}

and it works :D

I plan to use this library for my projects, it will reduce my work in implementing the basic functions.