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by ChrisRackauckas 1576 days ago
With the last update to repos in the org being 4 hours ago most no more than 5 contributors, that's about an order of magnitude less developers and development activity than just one Julia org (SciML) out of hundreds of orgs. For comparison, see https://github.com/SciML/ which saw 15 repos with changes by more than 15 developers in that time span. So by numbers, definitely not even close to the activity of just one part of Julia.
2 comments

As one of the main contributors to SciNim, let me tell you that we're painfully aware of the size of our community.

But when evaluating these things keep the following in mind:

- we're very active on matrix / discord [0][1] and more than willing to provide significant help to anyone who wishes to use Nim for scientific computing

- all of us that do use Nim for scientific computing wouldn't do it, if it wasn't feasible. While we're small, we do have all functionality that any of us need & in the cases where specific things are lacking, we have the ability to call Python [2], Julia [3] and R code [4].

And just keep in mind, every community starts small. :)

[0]: https://matrix.to/#/#nim-science:envs.net

[1]: https://discord.gg/f5hA9UK3dY

[2]: https://github.com/yglukhov/nimpy/

[3]: https://github.com/clonkk/nimjl

[4]: https://github.com/clonkk/nimjl

Thanks for the answer! What I would find very useful is an API that allows one to call directly BLAS/LAPACK routines. Is that possible in SciNim? If not, how difficult would it be to write the necessary wrappers? I had a quick look at the repo, but could not find the answer myself :p
We have both raw wrappers for BLAS:

https://github.com/andreaferretti/nimblas

as well as LAPACK:

https://github.com/andreaferretti/nimlapack

For an example, consider calling the least squares routine `dgelsd` in arraymancer:

https://github.com/mratsim/Arraymancer/blob/master/src/array...

wrapped up in a nicer user facing API.

Feel free to hop onto matrix, if you have more questions!

Pretty cool! nimblas in particular is what I was looking for. Will move to matrix if I have any other question ;)
> With the last update to repos in the org being 4 hours ago

4 hours ago? It says 4 days for me.

Yeah that's a typo. 4 days ago. It's just so insane for me to see no changes to any repo in an org for 4 days that I guess my hands auto-completed the sentence to hours haha, sorry.