[sage-devel] elliptic_e(0.5, 0.1) differs from Mathematica 7 by about 0.04%.

William Stein wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 10, 2009 at 1:02 AM, Dr. David Kirkby
> <david.kirkby at onetel.net <mailto:david.kirkby at onetel.net>> wrote:
>
>
>     Valery Pipin wrote:
>     > William Stein wrote:
>     > <<sorry, it's too long> >
>     >
>     >>> I've no idea how the Sage group would feel about switches
>     lisps. Given
>     >>> they have just recently done that (I forgot what was used
>     before), there
>     >>> might not be too much enthusiasm for it.
>     >> Since you have no idea, perhaps I should clarify:  There is no
>     way in hell
>     >> we are switching from ECL to anything else.
>     >>
>     >> ECL is massively better than CLISP, and is also the *only*
>     other lisp that
>     >> is currently supported and builds 100% from source code.   Both
>     CMUCL and
>     >> SBCL are immediately ruled out just because of that reason.
>      This is one of
>     >> the DoD requirements for Sage -- they absolutely will never
>     consider using
>     >> CMUCL or SBCL (I have asked).
>     > Too bad :-). Sbcl builds from the source on the most Unixes at least
>
>
> Just to be clear -- it does *not* build from source using the GCC
> compiler anywhere. It requires an existing common lisp implementation
> to get anywhere.  The first sentence of guide to installing SBCL from
> source says: "To build SBCL you need a working toolchain and a Common
> Lisp system  (see section 2.5 "Supported platforms")."   As a result,
> SBCL can't be used for Sage, as mentioned above.   I should also
> mention that according to
> http://sbcl.sourceforge.net/platform-table.html, SBCL doesn't support
> Microsoft Windows.
>  
How do you build gcc from source?  Why is SBCL (or cmucl) disallowed on
that ground but gcc is allowed?  What makes gcc special that it's not
required to build gcc 100% from source?

(Rhetorical questions.  I think I know the answer.)

>
>     >> Why do you think cmucl or sbcl would give high performance. Are you
>     >>
>     >>> suggesting ecl would give lower performance?
>     > It is certainly true. Should I write a paper for sage journal
>     about it?
>
I think this is debatable.  Someone here says cmucl runs his maxima code
much faster than sbcl.  The testsuite runs fastest with gcl.

The only way to know for sure is to try different ones on *your* code to
see which is fastest.

Ray