Re: Mathematica and F#
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg91588] Re: Mathematica and F#
- From: David Bailey <dave at Remove_Thisdbailey.co.uk>
- Date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 03:18:27 -0400 (EDT)
- References: <g93b2d$km1$1@smc.vnet.net>
Salvatore Mangano wrote: > I refer members of this group to my blog for a review of the section of "F# for Scientists" that is relevant to Mathematica. > > http://semanticvector.blogspot.com/2008/08/f-for-scientists-misses-boat-on.html > There is a simple reason why functional code in Mathematica outperforms procedural code - it is that each step in Mathematica comes with a substantial overhead because of the generality of the language. For example, in Mathematica, an operation like a=b+c clearly requires many things to be done - such as checking the types of the variables b and c, adjusting the reference count for any existing value attached to a, etc. Functional programming offers a way to reduce this overhead by bundling a lot of steps into one step. Lower level, fully typed languages - such as Fortran (where the variables are always typed, even if implicitly) do not suffer such overheads, and therefore there are no real speed advantages to using whole array operations (somewhat analogous to functional programming). 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. Note that, as I understand it, compilation in Mathematica only generates pseudo code which is executed by interpretation, so it should be outperformed by languages which are fully compiled. Java and .NET languages come into this category because their pseudo code is compiled immediately prior to the first use by a so called just-in-time (JIT) compiler. David Bailey http://www.dbaileyconsultancy.co.uk