ILNumerics, a high performance numerical calculation library for .NET, now offers a NuGet package with “Any CPU” support. In a separate release called ILView, a 3D visualization tool with REPL support has been announced.
ILNumerics gets a lot of its performance from the use of native code, which means you need separate 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the library. With the addition of purely managed matrix multiplication in version 3.0 the amount of native code dropped significantly, but has not been eliminated completely.
To make further progress towards platform independence, the developers needed to find a way to separate the 32 and 64-bit versions of the dependencies. On Windows one way to do this is to install the 64-bit DLLs in System32 and the 32-bit DLLs in SysWow64. But this puts quite a burden on the installer of application that uses ILNumerics.
Since this is a .NET library one could also try using AppDomain.AssemblyResolve, but the ILNumerics team dismissed it for a third option.
Applications use the PATH environmental variable to help it locate dynamically loaded libraries. So what ILNumerics did was alter the PATH variable on startup to include a bitrate specific subdirectory. These subdirectories are created by the NuGet package’s installation script so developers don’t need to do anything special.
ILNumerics is available under both GPL 3 and a commercial license.
ILView
The visualization tool, ILView, consists of two components. There is the 3D visualizer itself and a C#-based interactive console for entering equations. ILView runs on both .NET/Windows and Mono/Linux.
This application requires Mono.CSharp for the interactive console and OpenTK for rendering images using the OpenGL standard. These are included in the distribution, but for Linux you’ll also need to install the WinForms and GDI libraries.
This project is intended as community project. We (the maintainer of ILNumerics) will keep pushing updates to it. But we do explicitly encourage you to collaborate and to support the project. We are open for pull requests and general ideas for enhancements and new features.
ILView is provided under the MIT/X11 license.
