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.