forums.silverfrost.com

[mecej4]

About five years ago, I had noticed and reported ( http://forums.silverfrost.com/viewtopic.php?t=3702 ) the presence of the Netlib/PORT/SLATEC/BLAS/LAPACK routines D1MACH() and I1MACH() in the FTN95 RTL DLLs SALFLIBC.DLL and SALFLIBC64.DLL. These are undocumented, but appear to have the same functionality as the Netlib routines of the same name. They are not accurate, however, as this test program illustrates.

[mecej4]

Here is a test program to exhibit what can happen when a user's Fortran program uses one of the undocumented functions in SALFLIC(64).DLL.

[PaulLaidler]

mecej4

Thanks for the feedback. I think that both of these issues can be fixed. I just need to run the test suite to make sure that there are no side effects.

[mecej4]

That sounds encouraging, Paul. When you wrote "test suite", did you refer to the compiler test suite, or the SLATEC test suite?

Of the 54 test sets in SLATEC, one that gave me more trouble than the others is TEST04, which exercises the special function (FNLIB) part of SLATEC. For your convenience, I have prepared a Zip file of all the source files needed for just this test, and the Zip can be downloaded from:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s8XzKeXZtNPWAHckMvocMyvVLZqwIsoe/view?usp=share_link

I have grouped the files into two directories:

(a) Xlib contains the error reporting package plus the machine parameter files.

(b) T04 contains the source files and a driver for TEST04.

[PaulLaidler]

mecej4

Thank you for this useful information.

In this context our test suite only includes functions such as erfc that are 200x standard intrinsics.

Depending on its size, one option would be to add the whole of SLATEC to salflibc.dll/salflibc64.dll.

[mecej4]

In addition to the issues discussed earlier in this thread regarding building and running SLATEC tests using FTN95, there is a code generation error that occurs in programs that make heavy use of COMPLEX variables, such as TEST04 of the SLATEC test suite. I had noticed/suspected this behavior earlier, but it was elusive and not reportable.

Today, I was able to pin down the issue in a short reproducer. Whether the bug occurs or not is quite sensitive to the compiler options used. With /64, it occurs almost always regardless of the other options. Without /64, the code runs correctly almost always.

[mecej4]

[PaulLaidler]

mecej4

OK. I will look at the problem with COMPLEX variables.

Would it help if I send you new DLLs now with the fixes for the first two issues?

[mecej4]

Would it help? Definitely, and thanks for the offer.

[Kenneth_Smith]

The last time I looked at SLATEC, I gave up after reading the following:

[mecej4]

Kenneth, your remarks are spot on (the quote is from John Burkardt's repository https://people.math.sc.edu/Burkardt/f_src/slatec/slatec.html ). Some of the tests (there are 54+1 of those in the suite) require up to 70 source files, and it takes a bit of work to find which subset of the 1900 source files are needed for a particular test. I developed scripts to do that task, which only needs to be done once. The distribution provides a couple of text files that display dependency "trees".

On the other hand, the source codes are of good quality (but old F77 fixed form), written to a standard pattern, and the number of remaining bugs is quite small. Once a library has been built for a particular compiler, using the library is quite simple. For instance, I tried out the NLS part of the library on the NIST problem set ( https://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/strd/nls/nls_main.shtml ), and found that the algorithms performed so well that I became willing to put some effort into making the software a bit easier to use.

Documentation is rather Spartan, but hypertext versions exist (for example, see http://sdpha2.ucsd.edu/slatec_Source/toc.htm ).

In a few days, we should be able to provide you with a DLL that you can try, and I hope that you will.

[DanRRight]

When you create the library and place it on main website don't forget to give it very good advertisement, so that it will stand out of crowd of many other libraries

A plus would be also to make as many as possible demo examples

[PaulLaidler]

mecej4

I have sent you a pm.

[mecej4]

Thanks, I have obtained the new DLLs and run the SLATEC tests with them. The D1MACH results are now accurate and the built-in XERMSG appears to have the same interface as the SLATEC version. Once the complex variable issue discussed above gets fixed, all the SLATEC tests should report PASSED.

Here is a list of exported entry points in SALFLIB64/CLEARWIN64 that match entry names in SLATEC:

[PaulLaidler]

mecej4

Thanks for the list.

In a few cases the Silverfrost exports end with one or more $'s or @'s and these functions are unlikely to match similarly named SLATEC functions.