I'm proud to announce the initial release of FLINT 3.0. The FLINT 3 series is a complete rewrite of FLINT (Fast Library for Number Theory) from scratch, like FLINT 2.x was a complete rewrite of FLINT 1.x before it.
FLINT 3.0 is available as an interactive interpreter at: http://www.flintlib.org/flint3/ The most significant change in FLINT 3 is that the implementation language has been changed from C to JavaScript. With modern JIT-compiling JavaScript engines, antiquated static languages such as C are no longer necessary for high performance computing. Switching to JavaScript allows us to make the transition to emerging computing platforms such as Windows 8, tablets, mobile phones, and the cloud. A second major change is that the only supported coefficient ring is double-precision floating-point numbers (with JavaScript semantics). Exact bigints and rationals are just too slow and complicated to be worth the trouble, and besides, you rarely need more than 16 digits of precision anyway. Most of the scientific computing world has already realised as much, and we anticipate that this bold move will give us a head start of 6-8 years over the rest of the computer algebra community. The FLINT 3.0 interpreter uses a Lisp-like syntax. As an example computation, type 25 or (1 + 1) followed by ENTER. Since this is a first release, some minor bugs are still present, and the code might not work in all web browsers. We hope to sort these issues out in the coming years using iterative development. --Fredrik, on behalf of the FLINT development team -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
