[flint-devel] Fwd: FLINT 1.1 beta

[Bill H. <goo...@go...>]

Hi All,

I just released FLINT 1.1.0 beta. As the FLINT website is currently
down due to the upgrade of the machine (sage.math) which it is hosted
on, I give the following link:

http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/wbhart/webpage/flint-1.1.0.tar.gz

The documentation is here:

http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/wbhart/webpage/flint-1.1.0.pdf

I would be very pleased if any of you could run the test code on your
local machines and report any bugs. Running the tests is simply "make
check" in this version of FLINT. Please note that each module reports
separately - the final "all tests passed" only refers to the final
module tested. You have to scroll back through to check that all
modules passed all their tests.

Note you must link against GMP/MPIR and zn_poly
(http://www.math.harvard.edu/~dmharvey/zn_poly/) for this release. To
edit the lib and include directories for these, edit the file
"flint_env" and do "source flint_env". Full instructions are to be
found in the first few pages of the documentation if you get stuck. If
you cannot build zn_poly on your machine (considered very unlikely)
please report to David Harvey (dmh...@ma...) and refer to
the FLINT documentation for how to build without zn_poly. It is not
possible to build FLINT without either GMP or MPIR.

All the documentation is complete. Tests pass on both the old and new
64 bit sage.math, on 32 bit Cygwin and on a 32 bit linux. All
functions that should alias, do, and there is full test code for this.
Anyone wishing to use/wrap the new functionality in FLINT can use this
release. I've spent the past month testing and documenting it. There
are very few changes to the interface for FLINT 1.1.0.

Once build tests have passed and any issues resolved, I will valgrind
everything (I have already done a lot of this) and the beta status
will be lifted.

I will post an announcement on flint-devel and sage-devel when that
time comes, including a very long list of all the new features of
FLINT 1.1. This is a MAJOR new feature release, thus the beta release
before final!!

If any of you wish to be on the FLINT development list and are not
already on it, you can register with sourceforge:

http://sourceforge.net/account/registration/

 and subscribe at the following link:

http://sourceforge.net/mail/?group_id=182716

The traffic is very low except during English summer when
undergraduates work on the project when the traffic is medium. I would
value your contributions to the list.

If there is sufficient demand for a google groups for FLINT
development, I will create one and switch.

Subsequent feature releases will now be issued every 3 months, not
every year. FLINT 1.2, to be released in about 3 months, will contain
numerous speed ups and a new functions that got cut from 1.1. FLINT
2.0 will be issued in about six to nine months and will include a new
polynomial module, and Andy Novocin's new factoring
technique/heuristics for ZZ[x]. About 1/3 of the code for FLINT 2.0 is
already written, but not included in this release.

Many thanks to Andy Novocin for help with final documentation and
alias testing and thank you to the many contributors to this release
which are listed on the webpage:

http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/wbhart/webpage (normally
http://www.flintlib.org/)

The highlights of this release are fast polynomial GCD for ZZ[x],
(using heuristic GCD and modular half-gcd), which is now almost
uniformly faster than Magma:

http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/wbhart/flint-trunk/graphing/gcd19.png
(ignore the heading which is incorrect),

polynomial composition (due to Andy Novocin) and evaluation (which are
asymptotically faster than Magma) and factoring of polynomials in
Z/pZ[x] for word sized primes (much faster than Magma, due to Richard
Howell-Peak), new primality testing and factoring functions for word
sized integers (due to Peter Shrimpton) and a much faster quadratic
sieve for factoring integers.

Enjoy!

Bill.