Section: Software

MPC

Participant : Paul Zimmermann [contact] .

MPC is a floating-point library for complex numbers, which is developed on top of the GNU MPFR library, and distributed under the Lgpl license. It is co-written with Andreas Enge (LFANT project-team, Inria Bordeaux - Sud-Ouest). A complex floating-point number is represented by $x+iy$, where $x$ and $y$ are real floating-point numbers, represented using the GNU MPFR library. The MPC library provides correct rounding on both the real part $x$ and the imaginary part $y$ of any result. MPC is used in particular in the Trip celestial mechanics system developed at Imcce (Institut de Mécanique Céleste et de Calcul des Éphémérides), and by the Magma computational number theory system.

A new version, MPC 0.9 (Epilobium montanum), was released in February 2011, with new functions, some speed-ups, a few bug fixes, and a logging feature for debugging. Since version 4.5 of GCC, released in May 2010, GCC requires MPC to compute constant complex expressions at compile-time (constant folding), like it requires GNU MPFR since GCC 4.3.