Re: Speeding up Mathematica
- To: uiucuxc!yoda.ncsa.uiuc.edu!mathgroup
- Subject: Re: Speeding up Mathematica
- From: uiucuxc!yoda.ncsa.uiuc.edu!paul%wri (Paul Abbott)
- Date: Wed, 14 Mar 90 10:21:49 CST
Stephen Wolfram has done quite a bit of work on a function compiler for Mathematica which he hopes to make available for the next release. Also, you remark that you find Mathematica slow compared to Fortran and C. This remark has to be taken into context because the algebraic and diverse programming styles available in Mathematica mean that there are several ways of attacking a problem and these may be comparable or in many cases even faster than straight procedural programming. Paul Abbott Wolfram Research [I can fully support Paul's comments here. I tried for several years to write some pattern matchers in C to do some of my quantum field theory calculations. I was able to do the same work in Mathematica in a few weeks and with more power. True, the compiled C code ran a bit faster at first, but considering development time, Mathematica won easily. I have also found it to be a lot of fun to find tricky ways to optimize Mathematica code using lower level Mathematica functions. Conversations with Paul and others at WRI convince me that there are lots of nice techniques one can try. - SMC]