Status of GDL - GNU Data Language

arXiv:1101.0679v1 [astro-ph.IM] 4 Jan 2011 Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XIX O14.3 ASP Conference Series, Vol. XXX, 2009 Y. Mizumoto, K.-I. Morita, and M. Ohishi, eds. Status of GDL - GNU Data Language A. Coulais LERMA, Obs. de Paris, ENS, UPMC, UCP, CNRS, Paris, France M. Schellens1 J. Gales Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, USA S. Arabas Institute of Geophysics, University of Warsaw, Poland M. Boquien University of Massachusetts, Dep. of Astronomy, Amherst, MA, USA P. Chanial P. Messmer, D. Fillmore Tech-X GmbH, Zurich, Switzerland; Tech-X Corp, Boulder, CO, USA O. Poplawski Colorado Div. (CoRA) of NorthWest Res. Ass. Inc., Boulder, CO, USA S. Maret LAOG, Obs. de Grenoble, UJF, CNRS, Grenoble, France G. Marchal2, N. Galmiche2, T. Mermet2 Abstract. Gnu Data Language (GDL) is an open-source interpreted language aimed at numerical data analysis and visualisation. It is a free implementation of the Interactive Data Language (IDL) widely used in Astronomy. GDL has a full syntax compatibility with IDL, and includes a large set of library routines targeting advanced matrix manipulation, plotting, time-series and image analy- sis, mapping, and data input/output including numerous scientific data formats. We will present the current status of the project, the key accomplishments, and the weaknesses - areas where contributions are welcome! 1Head of the project 2Former students at LERMA CNRS and Observatoire de Paris 1 2 Coulais et al. 1. Dependencies GDL is written in C++ and can be compiled on systems with GCC (≥3.4) and X11 or equivalents. The code, under GNU GPL, is hosted by SourceForge. The library routines make use of numerous open-source libraries including: readline, the GNU Scientific Library (GSL), the PLplot plotting library, a Fourier trans- form package (FFTw), and others. Since recently (GDL 0.9rc4 release) GDL fea- tures multi-threaded matrix operations if compiled using an OpenMP-enabled compiler (e.g. GCC ≥4.2.) PLplot and GSL are the only mandatory dependencies. Data input/output is managed using ImageMagick, NetCDF, HDF and HDF5 libraries. FITS files can be read and written using the Astron Library. GDL features a Python bridge (Python code can be called from GDL, GDL can be compiled as a Python module). 2. Platforms, packages and compilation GDL runs on most recent Linux and *BSD systems, and also on Mac OSX and OpenSolaris. x86 and x86 64 are the key supported architectures, successful compilations on other architectures have been reported. Pre-compiled packaged versions of GDL are available for several operating systems including Mac OSX (e.g. via Macports), Debian and Ubuntu, Fedora and Red Hat, Gentoo, ArchLinux and FreeBSD. The source code compiles smoothly on most Linux distributions, *BSD, recent OSX3 versions and some other UNIX systems (e.g. OpenSolaris), as long as some caveats are avoided. Since the pre-compiled packages happen to be out of date and don’t include the latest bug-corrections and improvements, we strongly advice to try compiling GDL from source. The source code can be obtained from SourceForge where GDL development is hosted. The most recent additions to GDL are readily available at the CVS repository 4. 3. Useful libraries Large parts of the Astron Library are working well in GDL, including the FITS part. The MPFIT library (Robust non-linear least squares curve fitting based on MINPACK-1) does work with GDL. IDL save files can be read and written using the external CMSVLIB library. Success have been reported with the Wavelet Library. Due to limited number of graphical keywords currently available, and also due to the limited achievements of the Postscript output, some famous pub- 3On Mac OSX, which is an OS GDL does have significant number of requests from users, success have been reported on 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6. A tutorial for compilation on OSX which try to include the last tricks can be found here: http://aramis.obspm.fr/~coulais/IDL_et_GDL/GDLonOSX_10.5.6.html 4see http://sf.net/projects/gnudatalanguage/develop for details Status of GDL - GNU Data Language 3 lic libraries for complex graphical outputs (X11 and PS) are clearly limited in functionality. 4. Contributions Contributions are very welcome. A large number of bug-reports and improve- ments are coming from anonymous users, posting directly to the contributors or posting on the SourceForge forum. We really appreciate code donation under GNU GPL. There is a strong demand for more packaging effort. Development is clearly driven by end users (you), except for very difficult tasks (MEDIAN code development and testing was paid, based on T. Huang et al. (1979)). Please do not hesitate to report bugs, regressions, compilation problems, feature requests (e.g. missing keywords), or other comments – you can do it also anonymously at GDL SourceForge page (bug tracker or forum). Please do help in testing GDL by using the CVS version. Finally, please do not be impatient: GDL is developed by a team of v

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