Apple has some scienific computing software, that is specially optimized for the Mac OS and the processors it uses. Here's one:
https://www.apple.com/science/profiles/osxporting/index2.html Try a google search for: mac os x high performance computing and you'll find lots of interesting stuff. While discussing a product idea with a friend of mine, I mentioned that Bjarne Stroustrup was dismayed that C cannot guarantee that arrays don't overlap - when a function receives an array as a function argument, it's just a pointer, and there is no way of knowing whether it points to the beginning of an array, just past the end or somewhere in the middle. While one can supply a length to iterate over, it's quite possible - and common - that the whole array is larger than the given length. But FORTRAN *does* have that guarantee, and so FORTRAN compilers can optimize array operations in ways that C compilers - and, by extension - C++ compilers cannot. In The Design and Evolution of C++, Stroustrup laments that in some cases, FORTRAN optimizers can speed up array ops by a factor of THIRTY. I don't think I can recall a C or C++ optimizer ever getting so much as a factor of two improvement from unoptimized code. So when I said all that, my friend suggested that we ought to write our product in FORTRAN! It would be a very numerically intensive application, with lots of big arrays. Now, for ease of coding and maintenance, I would prefer to write in C++ - but FORTRAN was my first language, and I've written lots of it. So I could see how we could write all the numerically intensive stuff in FORTRAN. Mike -- Michael David Crawford mdcrawford at gmail dot com GoingWare's Bag of Programming Tricks http://www.goingware.com/tips/ _______________________________________________ macports-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.macosforge.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/macports-dev
