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Re:The chemfp project: problems selling free software by dekhn on Tuesday July 21, 2020 @09:59AM (#23906823)
Its a bit verbose, and I really think it's several papers (the technical details of the package is one, the open source positioning is another). But it's readable- a person outside the field (say, a search engineer at Google) could sit down, read this and immediately recognize what you were trying to achieve ("implement popcnt" used to be a popular question), and then immediately suggest ways to get the output results faster by using a cluster :)
Re:The chemfp project: problems selling free software by dalke on Tuesday July 21, 2020 @11:12AM (#23907426)
Indeed, it is several papers. There are two journals in my field - one I can't read because it's behind a paywall and one that's expensive to publish in. I choose the latter, but couldn't afford multiple months of rent in order to publish several papers. :(

A blog post I wrote years ago use to part of the "implement popcnt" literature - http://www.dalkescientific.com/writings/diary/archive/2008/0... . It's now outdated, and actual low-level programmers have done better, but it still gets mentioned in-passing in postings like the one referenced on HN last year at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20914479 .

Re:The chemfp project: problems selling free software by dekhn on Tuesday July 21, 2020 @12:40PM (#23908354)
It's really extraordinary how tightly coupled modern innovation in scientific fields is to processor implementations. I suspect you and I share a keen interest in the path by which we got to this enviable situation.