About alternatives to Matlab

[konrad.hinsen at laposte.net]

On 10.12.2006, at 11:23, Jon Harrop wrote:

> Konrad Hinsen wrote:
>> The lack of polymorphism, particularly in operators, makes OCaml code
>> a pain to write and read in my opinion.
>
> F# addresses this by adding operator overloading. However, you have  
> to add more type annotations...

That sounds interesting, but I'd have to see this in practice to form  
an opinion. As long as F# is a Windows-only language, I am not  
interested in it anyway.

> You want bigarrays, they are just C/Fortran arrays. Look at the  
> bindings to
> FFTW/LAPACK, for example.

That's good news, thanks.

>> Native code compilation is obviously important for speed. While many
>> popular processors are supported by ocamlopt, scientific users are
>> notorious for grabbing whatever fast hardware they can lay their
>> hands on. It seems safe to count on the GNU suite being ported
>> rapidly to any new platform.
>
> OCaml already supports 9 architectures and optimised to AMD64  
> earlier than gcc. How many do you want?

It's not a matter of number, it's a matter of availability when new  
processors appear on the market. How much time passes on average  
between the availability of a new processor type and the availability  
of a native code compiler for OCaml?

Konrad.
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Konrad Hinsen
Centre de Biophysique Moléculaire, CNRS Orléans
Synchrotron Soleil - Division Expériences
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91192 Gif sur Yvette Cedex, France
Tel. +33-1 69 35 97 15
E-Mail: hinsen at cnrs-orleans.fr
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