Hello,
I am looking for an actively maintained open-source numeric crate to contribute to. I have wide interests, but the crates listed on:
seem to mostly be in a stale state. I tried contributing but pull requests were either not answered to at all or only after multiple months.
Not trying to discredit anyone's work, I only want to know how to find an active community.
What are you trying to add or fix in the existing crates?
It should not be surprising that most numeric libraries don’t change very much. Math doesn’t change. A good library doesn’t constantly change incidental things either. (Of course, if a library has a bug, then that bug should be fixed.)
I general, there are still lots of open issues for most crates on that list.
If you are asking about my personal contributions, I tried some integrations for num-complex and nalgebra.
I understand this general feeling towards rust crates being finished. But there are still lots of open issues on those repositories.
Sometimes when doing maintenance of open source crate you'll just feel like, oh I see the issues, but wait till I have the time... And then time passed and you forget that GitHub email and the issue. Kind of a hard situation, as many numeric crate are tiny and are not maintained by teams.
Also worth noting that the converse is not true either: a crate with no open issues doesn't mean it's mature or "finished", instead maybe it hasn't seen enough use (not fully battle tested).
I'd see open issues as a statement "people get enough use out of the crate to care about improving it in the future". Those ideas may not be shared by the maintainer, or there may be a lack of manpower to accept and implement the best ideas (not all ideas).
It seems to me that if someone makes a crate, because it's useful to them, then it can still be useful to you without the maintainer going the extra mile to stay on top of the issues tracker.
Another example, given two identical crates, one where the maintainer hasn't replied to issues, and the other where they auto-replied to all issues "won't fix, closing", that wouldn't necessarily be a signal of higher code quality for either.
I did not intend to start a discussion about the status of the referenced math libraries. Dont get me wrong, I am quite impressed about most crates there.
On the other hand, I am personally only interested in finding out which crates are currently actively created/written/maintained/etc. . I'd like to help out but want to be sure that there is a need and merge requests will be reviewed/discussed in a short time frame.