[PPL-announce] Parma Polyhedra Library 0.12

[Roberto Bagnara]

The core development team is very pleased to announce the availability
of PPL 0.12, a new release of the Parma Polyhedra Library.

This release includes portability improvements, a few bug fixes, and
performance improvements for the MIP and PIP solvers.  and PIP
solvers.  Configurability has also been improved, especially as far as
the detection of GMP is concerned.

ECLAIR (http://bugseng.com/products/eclair) has been introduced into
the development workflow to bring the PPL into conformance with the
applicable rules in MISRA, CERT, NASA/JPL, ESA/BSSC and other
widely-used coding standards.

The precise list of user-visible changes is below.
For more information, please come and visit the new PPL web site at

        http://bugseng.com/products/ppl

On behalf of all the past and present developers listed at
http://bugseng.com/products/ppl/credits and in the file CREDITS,

   Roberto Bagnara  Patricia M. Hill  Enea Zaffanella  Abramo Bagnara

                              BUGSENG srl
                          (http://bugseng.com)


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
NEWS for version 0.12  (released on February 27, 2012)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

New and Changed Features
========================

o  New configure options `--with-gmp=DIR', `--with-gmp-include=DIR' and
    `--with-gmp-lib=DIR' supersede the (now removed) option
    `--with-gmp-prefix'.  (The old option never really worked; hopefully
    this is the last change in this area.)

o  New configuration option `--disable-documentation'.  When specified
    no new documentation is built: only the documentation already present
    in the source tree is installed upon `make install'.

o  The resolution process for PIP_Problem now better exploits the
    integrality of parameters to simplify the newly generated tautological
    constraints, the splitting constraints of decision nodes, and the
    expressions defining artificial parameters.

o  The implementations of the MIP and PIP solvers are based on a new
    data structure leading to significant space and time savings when
    the tableau matrix is sparse; the benchmarks of the ppl_lpsol demo
    show an improvement on the average case, that grows when the toughest
    tests in the benchmark suite are considered.

o  When the `--check' option is used, the input data for demo ppl_lpsol
    is perturbed the same way as GLPK does, thereby allowing for a
    meaningful comparison of the results obtained.

o  The input routine for PPL numeric datatypes has been extended to
    accept the ISO9899 (C99) hexadecimal floating constant syntax.

o  The Parma Watchdog Library has been merged into the
    Parma Polyhedra Library.


Bugfixes
========

o  Corrected a precision bug in methods

      Box<ITV>::upper_bound_assign(const Box&)
      Box<ITV>::upper_bound_assign_if_exact(const Box&)

    whereby, provided any argument is an empty box and under other rather
    specific conditions, the computed result was correct but unnecessarily
    imprecise.

o  Corrected a bug in method

      Grid::relation_with(const Constraint&) const

    whereby, under specific conditions, the method was creating invalid
    Grid_Generator objects and providing an incorrect result.

-- 
      Prof. Roberto Bagnara

Applied Formal Methods Laboratory - University of Parma, Italy
mailto:bagnara at cs.unipr.it
                               BUGSENG srl - http://bugseng.com
                               mailto:roberto.bagnara at bugseng.com