Week 14 Lecture 1: Arblib.jl and Flint documentation

The goal with this lecture is to build a little bit of familiarity with the documentation for Arblib.jl and Flint. Reading documentation is usually an important part in understanding how to make use of a library. The documentation usually contains description of the interface, but also often times has more comments about how to make best use of the software.

We will look at the Arblib.jl documentation as well as the Flint documentation (specifically the part for real and complex numbers).

Let us start with the documentation for Arblib.jl. Unfortunately, the documentation is lacking a big picture description of what it can do and how you can use it. Instead it is split into two parts, one describing the low level wrapper and one the high level interface.

Without prior familiarity with Flint, the description of the low level interface can be a bit difficult to read.

• Take a look at the low-level types. How do these compare to the sections in the Flint documentation?
• The Method part of the documentation describes how the Flint functions are wrapped. Unfortunately, there is currently very little documentation on how to actually make use of this methods.

The documentation of the high level interface is slightly more complete, though could still use some improvements. Many of these parts we have talked about in the course. For example, compare the documentation of printing with our Lab 6. Some of them, for example the part about Mutable arithmetic, we haven't talked about. Some of them are closely related to the Flint interface. You can compare the Arblib.jl documentation for integration with the associated part in the Flint documentation.