dlrRandom Utility Library

Introduction

This library provides a C++ wrapper around the LAPACK pseudo-random number generator. It is much less comprehensive than, for example, boost::random, but is very easy to use. The current version number is shown in file VERSION.TXT, and recent changes can be seen in the file RELEASE_NOTES.TXT.

Contact

Bugfixes and patches welcome! Please see the file LICENSE.TXT in this directory for up-to-date contact information.

License

Please see the file LICENSE.TXT in this directory.

Platform

This library is in regular use under Linux (32- & 64-bit), and not-so-regular use under Windows (32-bit). It should be portable to any platform supporting ISO C++.

Status

This is a reasonably stable library. Efforts will be made to maintain a consistent interface, and not break existing code.

Dependencies

In order to build this library, you must first install the following libraries:

dlrCommon dlrPortability lapack blas

You should be able to get dlrPortability and dlrCommon from the same place you got this library. Lapack and blas are included with most linux distributions and other unix-ish operating systems, such as OS X. Most linux distributions also include optimized versions of lapack and blas named atlas or atlas3. You can use these instead of the reference versions for higher performance. Non-free versions of lapack and blas which are optimized for intel CPUs are available for various platforms from http://www.intel.com. You may be able to find pre-built lapack binaries for your architecture at http://www.netlib.org/lapack/archives/. Libg2c is included as part of the gnu compiler collection. Depending on your OS distribution, it may be prepackaged for you, in its own package, or bundled with g77.

Installation

Visual Studio

If you're building under Visual C++, load the solution file:

./visualc/dlrRandom.sln

Building this file will put libraries in

./visualc/{Release,Debug}

NOTE: Microsoft's compiler considers much of the C++ Standard Library to be deprecated. Building this code under recent versions of VC++ generates lots of warnings telling you to use the use the confusingly named "Safe Standard C++ Library," which isn't standard at all, and as far as I know isn't portable to any other platforms. It's possible to disable these warnings. I encourage you to do so by adding "/D_CRT_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE" and "/D_SCL_SECURE_NO_DEPRECATE" to the compiler command line via the "properties" dialog for the .vcproj file within Visual Studio. I've done this for the .vcproj files included with dlr_libs, but you may find these warnings popping up in your own code when you include dlr_libs header files. Don't be fooled.

Please be aware that I hardly ever use windows, so the .sln/.vcproj files are usually a little out of date. I occasionally check that friends who use these libraries under windows are still happy, but I don't get patches too often. Let me know if you have any trouble, and please feel free to email with updates. Also note that the .vcproj files are all configured to build multi-threaded code. This may cause some trouble if you're linking with projects that use single-threaded code. See the code generation page of the project properties dialog to change this.

GNU Autotools

On every other platform, building and installing is done via GNU Autotools. If you're building from a tarball, the simplest possible version looks like this:

> tar -xvf dlrrandom-x.y.z.tar.gz
> cd dlrrandom-x.y.z
> ./configure
> make
> make install

If you're using the source files from subversion, you need to add a step:

> [get source from svn]
> ./bootstrap
> ./configure
> make
> make install

Of course, you may want to specify an installation directory:

> [get source from cvs and run ./bootstrap, or unpack tarball]
> ./configure --prefix=/home/jfisher/software
> make
> make install

Or some compiler options:

> [get source from cvs and run ./bootstrap, or unpack tarball]
> env CXXFLAGS="-g -Wall" ./configure \
    --prefix=/home/jfisher/software
> make
> make install

For more information on configure options:

> ./configure --help

Thanks, David LaRose