LGSL: A numerical library for Lua based on GSL

• Copyright (C) 2009-2016 Francesco Abbate, Lesley De Cruz and Benjamin von Ardenne
• Published under GPL-3

About

LGSL is a collection of numerical algorithms and functions for Lua, based on the GNU Scientific Library (GSL). It allows matrix/vector manipulation and linear algebra operations.

LGSL is not just a wrapper over the C API of GSL but offers a much more simple and expressive way to use GSL. The objective of LGSL is to give the user the power to easily access GSL functions without having to write a complete C application.

LGSL is based on the numerical modules of GSL Shell.

Requirements

• LuaJIT 2.0.3 or higher.
• GSL 1.14 or higher.
• graph-toolkit is recommended to create plots, and required to run the demos.

Usage

See the LGSL Documentation.

To see some demos, fire up LuaJIT and type:

require("lgsl.demos").run()

Installation Instructions

LGSL is implemented as a set of Lua files and depends on LuaJIT (version 2.0 or higher) and on the GSL library (version 1.14 or higher). As the implementation is in Lua, no compilation is needed.

The recommended way to install and update LGSL is with LuaRocks. To install the latest development version, run:

luarocks install --server=http://luarocks.org/dev lgsl 

The standard method to install LGSL without LuaRocks is to type make install from the source directory. The command will install all the required files in a system-wide directory in the package search path of Lua and requires sudo privileges. Before installing you may change the PREFIX directory in Makefile or with make install PREFIX=/path/to/install.

On Debian-based systems like Ubuntu or Debian itself, the package can be installed from a Debian package. The .deb package can be downloaded here:

luajit-lgsl deb for all architectures

The command make debian or simply make will build a Debian package in the source code directory. Once the package is created, it can be installed with sudo privileges using the command:

sudo dpkg -i name-of-debian-package

Dependencies

LGSL currently requires LuaJIT 2.0 or later to run. It is recommended to install the latest version of LuaJIT. Installation instructions for LuaJIT can be found on the LuaJIT website.

The short version (on POSIX systems):

git clone http://luajit.org/git/luajit-2.0.git
cd luajit-2.0
make && sudo make install

On most Linux distributions, the GSL library can be installed through your system package manager.

On Debian and derived distributions such as Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install libgsl0ldbl

On Red Hat and family, e.g. CentOS:

sudo yum install gsl.x86_64

On Arch Linux:

sudo pacman -S gsl

Other installation options can be found on the GSL website.

Recommended Packages

If you want to create plots or run the demos, you are advised to install the Lua Graphics Toolkit:

luarocks install --server=http://luarocks.org/dev graph-toolkit

More information can be found at graph-toolkit's GitHub page and the documentation.

Manual Installation

To manually install the package, the lgsl directory should be copied into a directory included in the standard Lua search path such as /usr/share/lua/5.1/. The files included in lgsl/templates should be included as well by copying them in a subdirectory named templates.