[plt-scheme] Number crunching -> Matthias, Eli

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 4:47 AM, Philippos Apolinarius<phi500ac at yahoo.ca> wrote:
> If I missed something, and there is a way to make PLT approach the speed of
> Bigloo and Gambit in the example below, please let me know.

Yeah, bind to a C library.

Seriously. In my field -- machine learning, which is very numeric --
most people find Matlab is plenty fast enough. PLT is faster than
Matlab, and pure PLT Scheme code has been fast enough for my
experiments (though I have created bindings to GSL for a case when I
thought I needed more speed.) The people who want more speed than PLT
+ select C libraries provides AND would actually consider writing
numeric code in Scheme is 0 + epsilon. Given the finite number of
Matthew Flatts in this world I believe effort is better spent
elsewhere. For example, a runtime that could take advantage of
multicore machines would benefit many more people that optimising
floating point calculations. I love performance as much as the next
guy -- my hard disk is littered with little compilers and so on -- but
it really isn't that important in the grand scheme of things.

N.