The core development team is very pleased to announce the availability of PPL 1.0, a new release of the Parma Polyhedra Library.

This release includes support for the optimized representation of sparse vectors of coefficients, achieving significant performance improvements, e.g., when dealing with constraint systems describing weakly relational abstractions such as boxes and octagonal shapes.

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 1.0 (released on June 28, 2012) --------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

o Significant improvements have been obtained in both time and space resource usage by the definition of data structures and algorithms for the case of "sparse rows", i.e., sequences of coefficients where most of the values are zero.

o The library fully supports two different representations for rows: the "dense" representation is an array-like representation tailored to sequences having most of their coefficients different from zero; the "sparse" representation saves memory space (as well as CPU cycles) when most of the coefficients in the sequence are zero.

o A generic interface allows for a seamless interaction between the dense and the sparse row representation. Most library entities (linear expressions, constraints, generators, congruences, and their systems) can be built using either representation, specified as a constructor's argument.

o As a by-product of this sparse/dense refactoring work, efficiency improvements have been obtained even for those computations that are still based on the dense row representation.

o Reasonable default values for the row representation are provided for each library entity, automatically leading to significant memory space savings even in old client/library code, e.g., when dealing with constraint systems describing weakly relational abstractions such as boxes and octagonal shapes.

o If desired, these default values can be customized to user's needs by changing just a few lines of library code. For instance, the constraint systems stored inside C_Polyhedron and NNC_Polyhedron objects can be made to use the sparse representation by just changing the following line in Polyhedron.defs.hh:

static const Representation default_con_sys_repr = DENSE;

to become

static const Representation default_con_sys_repr = SPARSE;

Bugfixes ========

o Fixed a bug affecting methods

bool BD_Shape<T>::contains(const BD_Shape& y) const; bool Octagonal_Shape<T>::contains(const Octagonal_Shape& y) const;

whereby the wrong result was obtained when *this is an empty weakly-relational shape and y is not empty.

o Fixed a bug affecting the PIP solver whereby a wrong result could have been obtained if the input constraint system contained multiple linear equality constraints.