Re: Linking Praat against the native GSL library
hi Rafael,
for several of these libraries we had to include corrections and patches, e.g. to make them Unicode-compatible or to make error reporting compatible with how it's done in Praat. As for GSL, it contains bugs. For instance, the function fisherQ in Praat uses the GSL version of incomplete beta, which is correct, but its inverse just crashes on some not-so-uncommon combinations of parameters, so we have an inversion computation that works better for this example than GSL does (see test/num/fisherQ.praat for GSL's crash).
In other versions of GSL, these bugs might be reversed. This means we cannot test correct execution of Praat with other versions of GSL. We can test Praat only with the version(s) we have control over, so we need to include the source code in our project. We just cannot afford random bugs in the DSP code, because such bugs influence research results. We therefore link with external libraries only in the case of GUI and graphics; those libraries may contain bugs there as well (e.g. Ubuntu 12.x broke the update of the Save menu), but those are easily spotted and reported by users and don't effect scientific correctness.
best wishes,
Paul
_____
Paul Boersma
University of Amsterdam
Linguistics
Spuistraat 210, room 303
1012VT Amsterdam, The Netherlands
http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/paul/
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