Install gaul with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage

Commands and aliases

• gaul_diagnostics

Project history

The project was created by Stewart Adcock and hosted on SourceForge, with the SourceForge project record dating to 2001. The official site describes GAUL as GPL-licensed open-source software, with CVS development hosted through SourceForge and documentation for Linux, Unix, Windows builds, examples, tutorials, and a reference guide.

Adoption history

GAUL's official 2005 release announcement says it was used in academic institutions and corporations, on systems ranging from desktop PCs to supercomputers, across North America, Europe, and Japan. The same release notes mention application areas such as protein structure prediction and rational drug discovery.

How it is used

GAUL is used as a programming library rather than primarily as an end-user CLI. The reference guide documents population and entity structures, callbacks, crossover, mutation, selection, replacement, disk I/O, MPI-specific functions, and additional search methods including tabu search, simplex search, differential evolution, simulated annealing, hill climbing, and gradient methods.

Why package nerds care

For package maintainers, GAUL is a classic SourceForge-era scientific C library: Autotools-based, GPL-licensed, and aimed at researchers who want a packaged optimization toolkit rather than a single command. Its packaging significance comes from preserving an older evolutionary-computation codebase with examples and headers usable by downstream C and C++ projects.

Timeline

• 2001: SourceForge project record was created.
• 2004-2005: Reference guide and tutorial material were updated for the 0.1849 series.
• 2005: GAUL 0.1849 added Differential Evolution support and was announced as a portability and scalability release.
• 2022: The official homepage copyright line shows continued site maintenance.

Related projects

• GAUL's official resources compare it with other genetic-algorithm and evolutionary-computation projects such as GAlib and related GA toolkits. The library also exposes S-Lang scripting support and parallel execution paths through MPI, OpenMP, pthreads, and forked processes.

Sources

• https://gaul.sourceforge.net/
• https://gaul.sourceforge.net/PRESSRELEASE050422.txt
• https://gaul.sourceforge.net/documentation.html
• https://gaul.sourceforge.net/gaul_reference_guide.html
• https://sourceforge.net/p/gaul/code/
• https://sourceforge.net/rest/p/gaul