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Re: Mathematica and F#

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg91610] Re: Mathematica and F#
• From: Bill Rowe <readnews at sbcglobal.net>
• Date: Fri, 29 Aug 2008 04:10:34 -0400 (EDT)

On 8/28/08 at 3:18 AM, dave at Remove_Thisdbailey.co.uk (David Bailey)
wrote:

>If you really need the ultimate in speed, you might as well code the
>core of a calculation in Java - but whether you use F# or C or Java,
>or whatever, you have to make sure that the extra speed is not lost
>in process swapping - remember that MathLink communicates to another
>process.

There is something else that ought to be considered before
pursuing this route. While it is certainly possible to get
significant speed improvements using a compiled language like C
or C++ instead of Mathematica, that comes at a cost. You have to
spend your time writing code to do things already built-in to
Mathematica and debug that code. The development time for well
written code will almost surely out weigh the time gained as a
result of performance improvements achieve with C or C++.

My experience with Mathematica has been whenever I had speed
issues simply spending more time thinking about the problem I
wanted to solve and perhaps choosing a better algorithm for the
solution as resolved the speed issue. And time spent thinking
about the problem I want to solve I find to be far more
productive than time spent re-creating some high level function
of Mathematica in C/C++ and debugging C/C++ code.