[Haskell-cafe] Re: Mathematica

[Jacques Carette]

Jon Harrop wrote:
> On Tuesday 12 June 2007 18:41:34 Tomasz Zielonka wrote:
>   
>> On Sun, May 13, 2007 at 02:19:55PM +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
>>     
>>> Writing *insanely* efficient number chrunking software requires a deep
>>> understanding of the target architecture, and lots of playing with very
>>> low-level constructs. Assembly is really the only language you can do it
>>> with; even C is probably too high-level.
>>>       
>
> Just reuse existing libraries: BLAS, LAPACK, ATLAS, FFTW. The free libraries 
> that I have benchmarked were all much faster than Mathematica. FFTW was 4x 
> faster on average, for example.
>   

You must have done benchmarks with very low numbers of precision, which 
is really boring and for which Mathematica is overkill.  If you are 
interested in numerical computations that require arbitrary precision, 
then Mathematica (I have to admit) is seriously good:
http://www.cs.ru.nl/~milad/manydigits/results.php
Note how, for all the 'easy' problems, it beats every competitor 
hands-down.  And how they did not even given entries for any of the 
'hard' ones!

Jacques