Initial- and boundary-value problems in Maxima.



On 9/14/2011 4:18 PM, Raymond Toy wrote:...


>
> I don't know why it's 100 times slower, though.  Perhaps some 
> additional optimizations by f2cl will reduce the cost.

I was puzzling over this too.  I would expect that with sufficient 
cleverness (which might entail writing some pieces of code directly in 
lisp)  one could get within 2X or so of fortran.... or -- for those 
lisps that support it -- directly calling via a foreign function 
interface, the fortran code would be just as fast.

If speed is important, the next step is, in my opinion, running some 
benchmarks with profiling so we know where the time is spent.  Is it 
actually in the array-referencing (are we calling subroutines to compute 
the array indexes? the code that is output from f2cl is not easy to 
figure out).  Or is it in allocating floating point number "boxes" ?  Or 
something else?


>
> The nice thing about the conversion is that with a little bit of work, 
> we can actually have a bigfloat version (that will run even slower!).
>
> Ray
>
>
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