Re: [dev] a suckless computer algebra system

On Fri, Nov 20, 2009 at 1:38 PM, Jukka Ruohonen <jruohonen_AT_iki.fi> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 02:23:35PM -0600, A.J. Gardner wrote:
>> Anyone know of any suckless math software out there in the tubes?
>
> As for algebra, the king of the hill is without doubt LAPACK. But since
> Fortran is nowadays seldom used, few people can tell if it "sucks in the
> sense of suckless" (?). But it is still the fastest language in it's own
> area; this may or may not be important.

FWIW, my understanding is that the LAPACK library must have an API
which conforms with a reference Fortran implementation, but there are
various versions implemented in various languages (Fortran, C, CUDA,
etc).

As for the code "quality", I can see the code driving certain people
on this list mad because it deliberately doesn't compute things in the
simplest way and fewest lines in order to do things like acheive close
to optimal cache blocking on modern multicore machines. A comparison
of how much performance can vary depending on how it's coded can be
glimpsed in the graphs in this paper:

http://www.tudelft.nl/live/ServeBinary?id=608b3015-5195-438a-90fc-c30c2252a066&binary=/doc/blas_lapack.pdf

-- 
cheers, dave tweed__________________________
computer vision reasearcher: david.tweed_AT_gmail.com
"while having code so boring anyone can maintain it, use Python." --
attempted insult seen on slashdot