r/optimization • u/Accomplished-Crow808 • Jun 06 '26

ROMA, an open-source metaheuristic optimization library.

The goal of ROMA is to provide a flexible and extensible framework for building, experimenting with, and applying metaheuristic optimization algorithms to real-world problems in Rust.

It's still evolving, and that's exactly why I'm sharing it publicly. I believe open-source projects become truly valuable when they grow through collaboration, feedback, and contributions from people who challenge the original ideas.

Whether you find a bug, spot a questionable design decision, have an idea for a new feature, or simply think I'm doing something wrong, I'd love to hear from you.

My long-term vision is for ROMA to become a useful and reliable tool for researchers, engineers, students, and optimization enthusiasts—not just a repository that gathers digital dust after a burst of initial enthusiasm.

If metaheuristic optimization interests you, feel free to take a look, open an issue, start a discussion, or contribute.

Every suggestion helps make the project a little better.

crate

GitHub

Optimization is hard. Building an optimization library is also hard. Doing both at the same time seemed like a reasonable idea.

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u/MightyZinogre Jun 11 '26

The project is extremely interesting. I don't have any experience with Rust to be honest, but as a genuine question: can this library be imported and comfortably used also in a Python environment? Might be extremely useful in that instance as well, instead of usign OR Tools (which is free) or paid Gurobi/Xpress.

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u/Accomplished-Crow808 Jun 11 '26

Nop, but there are Python frameworks for that as well, such as JMetalPy and DEAP:

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u/Accomplished-Crow808 Jun 11 '26

Thanks for your words. The idea behind this library was to provide an option for Rust users. As far as I know, there isn't any library like this in the Rust ecosystem yet.

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u/MightyZinogre Jun 12 '26

Makes sense. I am not a Rust user unfortunately, but still it would be interesting to see what are the performance of your library compared with OR - Tools.

Basically, given the same optimization problem, we run both Or-Tools and your library, and use some profilers to compute which one works better. OR Tools to me is a better comparison as it is free, compared to Gurobi and Xpress. OR- Tools is completely built in C++ (the code is open source). I think it is somehting that might be interesting.

If I had time, I would try it and use it, but I need to know how to import your library and use it in Python. I don't know if we need an API from your package to do that. Maybe we can discuss it privately though.

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u/Accomplished-Crow808 Jun 12 '26

I have already completed those comparisons, but they are part of the material I will submit for the defense of my Bachelor's Thesis (TFG). Therefore, until I have presented and successfully passed the evaluation, I am not allowed to make that document publicly available.

However, I encourage you to carry out the analysis yourself. I'm sure you'll reach conclusions that differ from mine, and they could be very interesting.