Comparison to Nemo.jl

[chakravala]

How does this compare with arb from Nemo?

[kalmarek]

The main difference is that Nemo is actually usable at this moment ;)

[Joel-Dahne]

Now that we have made the first release I guess you can call this package at least somewhat usable! About the comparison I would say the big difference is that Nemo is creating an entire ecosystem in Julia for computer algebra, Arb is only a small part of that. Arblibs focus is on creating a thin wrapper around Arb for incorporating it into the existing Julia ecosystem. Some examples of differences:

• arb in Nemo is not a subtype of Real as one would expect (this is a consequence of Julia only allowing one subtype) and thus many already existing numerical methods in Julia wont work with arb directly since they expect an argument of type Real. In Arblib we indeed have Arb being a subtype of Real as expected.
• In Nemo constructing an arb requires a parent field RealField, which makes sense in a computer algebra system where you work with different basefields. This has the consequence that zero(arb) and similar things won't work and this also breaks a lot of composability with Julia in general.

In general Arb in Arblib works very similar to BigFloat in Julia Base and in principle (at least when the library is a bit more mature) everything which can work with BigFloat should be able to work with Arb.

Hopefully this at least partially answers the question!