StableDQMC.jl

[carstenbauer]

Out of curiosity, why make a new package instead of extending StableDQMC.jl?

Also, a bit of bike shedding: the name StableLinearAlgebra.jl is a bit too general for my taste and could have been used for a more general effort of implementing stable linear algebra. But AFAICS you already registered the package, so it's too late for this discussion.

[cohensbw]

Yeah, in hindsight you are 100% right about the package name...

I implemented the package for a few reasons. Partly just for the purpose of learning and understanding how the stabilization worked. Complicated algorithms like that always feel a bit like a black box to me until I implement them myself. Also, I have a slightly OCD level fixation with trying to eliminate as many dynamic memory allocation in my code as I can, so I wrote this package in such a way that try an eliminate all of them. If you take a look at the JDQMCFramework.jl package that uses this package, the entire framework for DQMC can be set up and run with no dynamic memory allocations occurring. I realize this is most likely completely overkill, but my goal was to make that package and this one as lightweight as possible, and part of that for me included having these "low-level" packages avoid dynamic memory allocations wherever possible. I have been bitten by dynamic memory allocation in the past with Julia. Especially when you are trying to convince a PhD advisor that coding in Julia is not a bad idea, and he asks you to benchmark your codes against his Fortran codes... 😆

[carstenbauer]

Fair enough. In particular, I can understand the point about having to implement the algorithms yourself to understand them properly. In general, I just think that it would be great to join forces where possible and avoid fragmenting the ecosystem unnecessarily.

Fortunately, I've been lucky with my PhD supervisor. He was open about me using Julia for DQMC and, by now, almost the entire condensed matter department is using Julia :)

BTW, you may or may not know this but you have a QMC + Julia companion at ORNL in @williamfgc.