README

newVM

newVM is a Free Pascal / Lazarus library providing matrix/vector objects that wrap Intel MKL (BLAS/LAPACK/VSL), Intel IPP, OpenBLAS, FFTW, and (where available) GPU acceleration via OpenCL/clFFT and Metal. It is explicitly inspired by the Dew MtxVec library for Delphi.

Why this exists

This library was developed largely so that I could migrate my own software off Delphi/MtxVec and onto Free Pascal, while keeping access to hardware-accelerated linear algebra where a given machine has it available. Unlike MtxVec, newVM does not distinguish matrix and vector types — a vector is just an (N,1) or (1,N) matrix — and it ships in four parallel real/complex × double/single "flavours" plus an integer companion type for index work. See CLAUDE.md for the full architecture writeup.

Caveat

This is not a commercial package — I have included only those features I needed for my own applications, and no guarantees are given as to its performance. If you want a robust, commercial-level package I recommend MtxVec or the SDL library.

Platform support

newVM is developed to be multi-platform, and has so far been built and verified on:

• Windows 11
• Kubuntu
• macOS
• Raspberry Pi

All of the demo applications run on all four platforms. The one exception is SDR_Radio — a small software-defined-radio test application built on top of newVMCL (the OpenCL-backed matrix type), put together with Claude's help as a way to exercise GPU-accelerated FFT and real-time DSP through the library rather than as a polished product in its own right. It works on all four platforms, but is inherently limited by the SDR hardware and available compute, particularly on Raspberry Pi.

Acceleration libraries — you need to configure your own machine

None of MKL, IPP, OpenBLAS, FFTW, OpenCL/clFFT, or Metal are vendored or auto-installed by this repository. Each machine needs the relevant libraries installed and discoverable (on PATH, or via the platform's normal dynamic-linker search) before building:

Platform	Expected acceleration libraries
Windows	BLAS (MKL/OpenBLAS), LAPACKE (MKL), FFTW, OpenCL + clFFT
Linux (Kubuntu, etc.)	BLAS (MKL/OpenBLAS), LAPACKE (MKL), FFTW, OpenCL + clFFT
macOS	FFTW, Metal (+ MetalPerformanceShadersGraph)
Raspberry Pi	FFTW, Arm Performance Libraries (ArmPL)

Run newvmconfigure (see CLAUDE.md's "Build" section) after installing libraries on a given machine — it probes what's actually present and regenerates newVMConfig.inc accordingly. Any backend that isn't found falls back to a pure-Pascal implementation automatically (PUREPASCAL), so the library still builds and runs correctly without any of these installed — just slower.

Acknowledgements

This library's fallback code and a good deal of its implementation work were built with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic). The pure-Pascal eigenvalue decomposition fallback (PurePascalEigHqr2/S) is ported from the EISPACK-derived Balance/Elmhes/Eltran/Hqr2/Balbak routines in LMath, a third-party Pascal numerical library vendored under LMath/ for reference. See CLAUDE.md for the specifics of what came from where.

Contributing

Other developers are welcome to use and extend this code.

Licence

Copyright (C) 2026 Howard Dent.

newVM is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. It is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See LICENSE for the full text.

Third-party material in this repository keeps its own licence, not this one: LMath/, Delphi OOFEM/, demos/JetVent/naca1135.pas and rayfanno.pas (public domain), Anaesthetics/PK-PD/ut_dgls.pas (J-P Moreau) and its DMath-derived ubisect/usecant/uerrors, the three Kaps-Rentrop integrators ported from Numerical Recipes (Anaesthetics/PK-PD/kaps_Rentrop.PAS, Anaesthetics/PK-PD_FPC/uKapsRentrop.pas, demos/Benney/ukapsrentrop.pas), whose terms are Numerical Recipes' own, the recorded data under demos/BioSpectra/data/ (see its README.md for sources and terms), and the place, outline and county tables in demos/CanterburyRain/*.inc (GeoNames, CC BY 4.0; Natural Earth, public domain; ONS boundaries and Met Office averages, Open Government Licence).

Screenshots

Wave2D_FPC (under demos/Chebyshev/), a Chebyshev-spectral solver for the 2D wave equation u_tt = u_xx + u_yy, rendered live via the TVMPlot3D component:

JetFlow (under demos/), a jet-ventilation calculator built on JetVent's cannula model: oxygen flow from the driving pressure and the jet's bore and length, whether the jet is choked, the highest Mach number and lowest temperature and pressure in the jet, its thrust, and the stall pressure into adult male, adult female and 7-year-old tracheas; any bore and length, or one of JetVent's six bench cannulae from a list. Here the Lindholm (2 mm, 9.5 cm) at 3.5 bar is choked and expands to Mach 1.31 at −55 °C outside it: