On Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:13:21 -0500, Jason Lillywhite wrote: > After reading a little about gsl and trying bindings in Scheme and Ruby, > I have come to feel that GSL is comparable to matlab, scilab, or > mathimatica. But since then, have been told by some that I might be off > a little. How much are we missing out on by using GSL instead of say, > Matlab when it comes to numerical methods. BTW - I am a beginner in > MatLab, GSL, and numerical methods. >
Hi Jason, /My/ thoughts on your question: GSL has a number of characteristics which are different from Matlab, scilab and Mathematica. These are primarilay: Licence: GSL has a Free licence. Matlab and Mathematica are propiretary. This can have have subtle and unexpected repercussions: for example, my Univeristy dept has a high Matlab dependence but has had to remove students ability to batch process Matlab jobs since this can only be performed legally using Matlab's batch processing engine - the licence for which my university can't afford. Scilab is Free, so the difference doesn't hold here. Library vs Environment: GSL is just a library, Matlab, Matlab and Scilab provide a whole environment for rapidly prototyping/developing ideas and applications. This environment includes (most notably from my view) graphical output. "... How much are we missing out on by using GSL instead of say, Matlab when it comes to numerical methods... " In my experience GSL is a mature and fully featured library. I have not found it wanting for my area of interest (physics, statistics, fitting). The documentation is solid and precise. After using it for a while I discovered that it I was learning numerical methods with more detail than high-level 'environment' users. However, gaining this knowledge to use GSL generally takes a little more effort. Your choice should reflect your application or task. In my case I have had success prototyping in a high level 'environment' and then porting the high performance code to GSL when I wanted to start producing results. best regards, Richard _______________________________________________ Help-gsl mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-gsl
