Open source project of the day: YAMP

Over the last four years I have contributed a fair amount of code to the open source community. Some of these projects I have initiated myself, other projects are forks of existing projects that I have adapted to Portable Class Libraries or new target platforms. The projects range from optimization and scientific computing, over medical imaging and image processing to utility libraries. In this mini-series I intend to give a short introduction to each of these open source projects.

Since I have just recommended the project on StackOverflow, I thought I'd start with YAMP. YAMP is short for Yet Another Math Parser. It is written mainly by Florian Rappl, and is a high-performing parser of mathematical expressions including scalar, vector and matrix algebra, a vast set of mathematical and statistical functions, variable management and so on. The parser is relatively fast compared to other mathematical parsers available, and it is written entirely in managed C# code; it has no dependencies towards native libraries.

Originally, YAMP was targeted solely at the .NET Framework. However, since YAMP is written entirely in C# and is only using a limited set of non-portable classes and methods, I took on the challenge of porting YAMP to a Portable Class Library, PCL, targeting as many of the Microsoft (Windows 8/Metro, Windows Phone, Silverlight) and Xamarin (iOS, Android) platforms as possible. It was a relatively simple task to adapt YAMP to PCL. The original code made use of some non-portable methods that could be easily replaced with corresponding calls to portable equivalents. The main issue turned out to be the inclusion of file I/O operations in the vanilla YAMP version. Fortunately, these classes were isolated and could easily be excluded from the PCL class library.

I published my adaptations in a Github fork of the original YAMP library; my fork is available here.

My work was appreciated by the main author Florian Rappl, and I have continuously collaborated with him to merge all PCL adaptations into the main YAMP repository.

Now, YAMP is avaliable as a .NET Framework only NuGet package here, and a PCL enabled NuGet package YAMP.Portable is available here.

To learn more about YAMP, you may also have a look at this CodeProject article by Florian Rappl.