On Wednesday, 7 December 2016 at 11:48:32 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
On Wednesday, 7 December 2016 at 06:17:17 UTC, Picaud Vincent
wrote:
Considering scientific/numerical applications, I do agree with
Ilya: it is mandatory to have zero overhead and a
straightforward/direct interoperability with C. I am impressed
by the Mir lib results and I think "BetterC" is very
attractive/important.
As always, it depends on what you are doing. It is mandatory
for some numerical applications. R, Matlab, Python,
Mathematica, Gauss, and Julia are used all the time and they
are not zero overhead. A fast way to kill their usage would be
to force their users to think about those issues. What matters
is the available libraries, first and foremost, and whatever is
second most important, it is a distant second.
I write D code all the time for my research. I want to write
correct code quickly. My time is too valuable to spend weeks
writing code to cut the running time by a few minutes. That
might be fun for some people, but it doesn't pay the bills.
It's close enough to optimized C performance out of the box.
But ultimately I need a tool that provides fast code, has
libraries to do what I want, and allows me to write a correct
program with a limited budget.
This is, of course, not universal, but zero overhead is not
important for most of the numerical code that is written.
R, Matlab, Python, Mathematica, Gauss, and Julia use C libs.
--Ilya
