choffstein/julia — comment on commit d35f535ba2c372e4a7ebbb602ee95f7c70fb2d1e
File:  line 0
By StefanKarpinski:

Two things:

1. Not sure about making zlib a build dependency. We're starting to really balloon here in terms of things we download and compile with Julia. A lot of the other ones are like that because, e.g., how random number generation and matrix multiplication is a core part of the language. I'm not sure the same argument can be made for compression. Seems like a case where we should use whatever version of the library the system already has installed.
2. Was it not possible to directly call zlib from Julia without a wrapper? The `compress2` and `uncompress` functions seem to provide a pretty decent interface that uses only basic C types of the kind that Julia can call. Throw in the "undocumented" function `zError` and you should even be able to raise readable errors when something goes wrong.

On the subject of wrappers, they are generally something to avoid in Julia if at all possible — ideally we call all C libraries directly. The only reason we have one for the double-conversion library is because it only exposes a C++ source code interface — there is no shared library, so I had to make one. @ViralBShah wrote the SuiteSparse one, and looking at it, I'm wondering if we can't get rid of it. I've already expressed the position that we should get rid of the gmp wrapper too.