[Coin-announce] COIN LP solver 0.90

[John J Forrest]

I am pleased to be able to announce that a new LP solver has been put into
COIN.  I thought it important to have a solver which had a license which
allowed it to be freely used in any application by any user, academic or
commercial.  CLP (COIN LP) is a Simplex solver which is under the CPL as is
all code in COIN.

The intention is for it to be at least as robust as the best commercial
solvers and to be reasonably competitive on speed.  To achieve robustness,
I need to know which problems it can't solve.  Speed I will leave for now -
we do need a presolve before we can get to version 1.0.

It has message handling facilities.  I would welcome people helping with
language support.  I am posting some details of the message handler on
coin-discuss as Osi is also using the message handler e.g. for
OsiMpsReader.

Discussion of technical details of CLP should be on coin-lpsolver.

For a short time CLP is on the development branch of COIN.  Laci will be
saying how to get this branch - or you can just wait a few days.

John