New Boxplot
In terms of functionalities this release introduce boxplots to be used from the General Data Table.
Now creating a boxplot from a tabular dataset is as simple as writing gdt.boxplot(data, "income ~ gender, age").
The barplot also got a related improvement to choose more nicely the bars' width based on the x axis data layout.
Updated documentation hosted on github
The documentation was updated for the new release and is now on github:
http://franko.github.io/gsl-shell/
Build and packaging modernization
The major changes for GSL Shell are behind the curtains, in the build and packaging implementation.
We moved to FOX 1.7 to have support for High DPI monitor of windows and other improvements.
All the build system was moved to Meson and the source code was reorganized.
The GSL library is now statically linked to the executable so that the application does not depends on any external DLL or shared library on linux. We still use the OpenBLAS library as a BLAS library for GSL but the process was simplified and made more accurate. The minimum supported CPU is Nehalem but with dynamic support that detects the at run-time CPU and choose the best kernel for maximum speed.
Additional packages using GSL CBLAS instead of OpenBLAS are provided for older CPU types using only the x86-64 instruction set.
LuaJIT source code is no longer included with source code of GSL Shell but is used as a subproject. In turns LuaJIT is fetched from a repository with minimal changes and easily merged with upstream changes. As a result the LuaJIT used is the most recent version from the 2.0 branch.
For Linux we provide now standalone executable that works on most distributions and requires only libc and standard xorg runtime libraries. In turns the application is packaged as a portable application that can be installed in any prefix directory using a unix-like files' layout.
We provide also a practical AppImage executable for Linux.