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Any idea why Google made their own library instead of working on (or forking) another library like GLPK or CLP? And is there any benchmarking data? I couldn't s

Any idea why Google made their own library instead of working on (or forking) another library like GLPK or CLP? And is there any benchmarking data? I couldn't see any on the site. If I had to guess I'd say this is meant for Google Docs to fill in one of the Excel feature gaps. It probably focuses more on stability/accuracy than speed, and probably won't provide performance comparable to existing packages. Might have grown out of someone's hobby project or a university assignment.

mzl 12y ago
I'm not an expert on LP-packages, but in my small experience most LP packages are not that great in areas such as API design, modularity, and other similar non-mathematical areas that are important to programmers. My guess is that they wanted something small, simple, and easy to build into other products. I've heard from some of the or_tools developers that the internal usages are most often for rather simple problems. In such cases, ease of use is quite important. That being said, or_tools is a very competent optimization package. For example see the results in the latest MiniZinc Challenge: http://www.minizinc.org/challenge2014/results2014.html http://www.minizinc.org/challenge2014/results2014.html.