7.2 Disadvantages

Of course it also has some disadvantages:

• advanced features: GiNaC cannot compete with a program like Reduce which exists for more than 30 years now or Maple which grows since 1981 by the work of dozens of programmers, with respect to mathematical features. Integration, non-trivial simplifications, limits etc. are missing in GiNaC (and are not planned for the near future).
• portability: While the GiNaC library itself is designed to avoid any platform dependent features (it should compile on any ANSI compliant C++ compiler), the currently used version of the CLN library (fast large integer and arbitrary precision arithmetics) can only by compiled without hassle on systems with the C++ compiler from the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).¹ GiNaC uses recent language features like explicit constructors, mutable members, RTTI, dynamic_casts and STL, so ANSI compliance is meant literally. Recent GCC versions starting at 2.95.3, although itself not yet ANSI compliant, support all needed features.