Polymake.jl 0.4 has been released

27 Apr 2020

Polymake.jl 0.4 has been released!

Since we’re upgrading to support CxxWrap.jl 0.10.1, we decided to bump the major version to force compilation of libpolymake against libcxxwrap-julia. The release has been somewhat hastened by the need for Oscar.jl jointly working with the newest CxxWrap.jl, so expect 0.4.1 and later minor versions rather heavy in added features :).

Note: We’re tracking the version of libcxxwrap-julia used, so that we can warn you whenever executing import Pkg; Pkg.build("Polymake") is necessary, but some of the cases might have slipped us. If you experience crashes while using Polymake try:

• import Pkg; Pkg.free("CxxWrap"),
• import Pkg; Pkg.build("Polymake"),
• filing a bug report!

Below you can find a summary of the major changes and design decision we have taken in the development of Polymake.jl.

Happy coding,
on behalf of the polymake Team,
Marek

Changes between Polymake.jl 0.3 and 0.4

Library updates

• Polymake.jl can now be used with CxxWrap 0.10.1 or later
• Polymake.jl uses LoadFlint.jl and latest SingularBuilder

New features

• documentation strings of all polymake functions and methods was made available in julia
• handling of polynomials should be much smoother
• polymake banner is suppressed when imported in Oscar.jl

Fixed notable bugs

• libpolymake no longer requires GLIBCXX_3.4.26, i.e. Polymake.jl is compatible with libstdc++ shipped by julia, even when using very modern Linux systems (big thanks to Max Horn for investigating!)
• polymake doesn’t grab all interrupts, so after using Polymake one can still Ctrl^C to interrupt julia. However…

Known Bugs:

• a Ctrl^C interrupt issued during computations in polymake may render involved objects into incomplete state which is leads to segfault at exit(). We can not exclude silent data corruption in the process, so please DO NOT DO IT. We will be looking into a proper solution in the near future.