Section: Software

GNU MPFR

Participant : Paul Zimmermann [contact] .

GNU MPFR is one of the main pieces of software developed by the Caramel team. Since end 2006, with the departure of Vincent Lefèvre to Ens Lyon, it has become a joint project between Caramel and the Arénaire project-team (now AriC, Inria Grenoble - Rhône-Alpes). GNU MPFR is a library for computing with arbitrary precision floating-point numbers, together with well-defined semantics, and is distributed under the Lgpl license. All arithmetic operations are performed according to a rounding mode provided by the user, and all results are guaranteed correct to the last bit, according to the given rounding mode.

Several software systems use GNU MPFR , for example: the Gcc and Gfortran compilers; the Sage computer algebra system; the Kde calculator Abakus by Michael Pyne; cgal (Computational Geometry Algorithms Library) developed by the Geometrica project-team (Inria Sophia Antipolis - Méditerranée); Gappa, by Guillaume Melquiond; Sollya, by Sylvain Chevillard, Mioara Joldeş and Christoph Lauter; Genius Math Tool and the Gel language, by Jiri Lebl; Giac/Xcas, a free computer algebra system, by Bernard Parisse; the iRRAM exact arithmetic implementation from Norbert Müller (University of Trier, Germany); the Magma computational algebra system; and the Wcalc calculator by Kyle Wheeler.

The main development in 2012 is the release of version 3.1.1 (the “canard à l'orange” release) in July. With respect to version 3.1.0, this new version improves the reference manual, and fixes a few bugs. Also, a workshop was organized in June in Bordeaux, on the development of GNU MPFR and GNU MPC . In particular, the test coverage of GNU MPFR was improved.