Complex networks in D

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2024-10-30 07:00:03

What happened? Well, I took up a job at the Politecnico di Torino, I got rather busy, and … oh, details can wait. In the meantime, I thought I’d share some recent fun stuff that I’ve been doing with the D programming language — a small and currently very basic library for complex graphs.

Complex networks are something that I’ve been working close to professionally for a long time and yet, oddly enough, I’ve never particularly gone into the dark details of coding them. This is most likely because, absent some pressing need, many of the basic things one wants from a graph library are easier to knock up on the fly. It takes much less time and effort to write something quick’n’easy that does the handful of things you want, than to bend your otherwise completely original code to the needs of some specific library solution.

Sometimes, though, you want the heavy-duty toolbox, and when this comes along you have a number of options. There’s the Boost Graph Library, an STL-style C++ generic programming solution; there’s NetworkX, an attractive Python library; and then there’s the serious big hitter, igraph, which is written in C but also has interfaces in Python and R.