Hi,
I just started out with iTensor for some simple DMRG calculations. I was just wondering, why the installation for C++ code base uses gnu make and not CMake? Are there any plans to migrate to a CMake installation.
Glad you are using ITensor for your DMRG calculations. While the C++ version is very powerful for DMRG calculations, I would recommend you consider the newer and equally fast Julia-language version for anything more advanced than DMRG since, among other reasons, we are putting all new features and development into the Julia version.
Regarding make versus CMake, while I was open to using CMake, I was never fully convinced that it solved more problems than it introduced. I didn’t hear from many users having problems or trouble with the make setup, and it has a key advantage that make is pre-installed on most Linux or Unix systems.
On the other hand, I found CMake difficult to set up and somewhat cumbersome to use, though I certainly might not have seen the best examples of how to configure it (the examples I did see seemed very complex). That and we kept the number of dependencies of C++ ITensor intentionally very low (basically just BLAS/LAPACK) so the features of CMake related to compiling against or linking to other libraries wasn’t something we needed too much.
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