Main goals
Both GAP and SageMath systems have traditions of regular developer meetings, where those interested in these systems, from newcomers to contributors, are gathering together for collaborative code writing, sharing best practices, advertising recent new features and improvements, and discussing further developments. You can find the list of previous GAP days at http://gapdays.de/} and of SageMath days at \url{https://wiki.sagemath.org/Workshops.
Following these traditions, it was decided to organise the 1st Joint GAP-SageMath Days, with the focus on improving GAP-SageMath integration and interaction between these systems and between their developers.
OpenDreamKit implication
The 1st Joint GAP-SageMath Days were mainly supported by CoDiMa – Collaborative Computational Project (CCP) in the area of Computational Discrete Mathematics (EPSRC grant EP/M022641/1, http://www.codima.ac.uk/). It was immediately followed by the WP7 Workshop ``Knowledge representation in mathematical software and databases’’ on January 25th-27th, 2016, therefore OpenDreamKit participants involved in GAP and/or SageMath development could conveniently attend both events. Accommodation, subsistence and travel expenses of partners from UPSud and UVSQ were paid by the OpenDreamKit project, and those of partners from UNIKL,UOXF were reimbursed by the CoDiMa project.
Event summary
A typical day of the workshop had one or two introductory talks to facilitate subsequent discussions and coding sprints, in particular:
- Contributing to Sage by Nicolas M. Thiéry and Volker Braun
- **Contributing to GAP ** by Max Horn, Olexandr Konovalov, and Markus Pfeiffer
- libGAP by Volker Braun
- GAP in the cloud by Markus Pfeiffer
Other topics included, among others, further integration of HPC-GAP into GAP; working on the semantic-aware SageMath interface to GAP; improving the installation of GAP in SageMath and in SageMath cloud; creating and working with Docker containers; development of GAP and SageMath teaching materials for Software Carpentry, etc.
Results and impact
The workshop was very productive. Only to the main GAP repository (https://github.com/gap-system/gap/) there were 51 new pull requests submitted, just 8 of which are still open; in addition, 28 new issues were created (9 of them are closed by now), and there was also progress achieved with GAP packages developed elsewhere; the work on converging GAP and HPC-GAP; discussing development workflows, etc. It helped to both GAP and SageMath teams to get further insights into each other’s systems and was particularly beneficial to WP3 (component architecture), WP4 (user interfaces) and WP5 (high-performance computing).