Maxima Lapack is very slow: 7 seconds versus 0.002 seconds in Julia.

On Mon, May 7, 2012 at 10:03 PM, Robert Dodier <robert.dodier at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 2012-05-05, Raymond Toy <toy.raymond at gmail.com> wrote:
> > On 5/5/12 9:00 AM, Manuel Pedrinero rossetil wrote:
>
> >>   Perhaps the efforts in linear algebra of Rosseti, Tamas, Raymond,
> >> Liliam (gsl), Luis Oliveira. (cffi) and others could be ported to maxima
> >> or some interface via cffi between Julia and maxima could be very
> >> interesting.  There also some Lispers that use Lisp and R (for example
> >> C. Rhodes) .  Improving the numeric capabilities of maxima could appeal
> >> to more people and communities.
>
> > Let us not lose sight of what maxima is.  It is a computer algebra
> > system, not a numerical evaluation system.  There are many of those
> already.
>
> Well, we don't have to choose one or the other. Ideally Maxima would
> combine symbolic and numerical capabilities. Given the history of the
> project and the people working on it, there's more emphasis on symbolic
> stuff. But there's no reason to rule out expanded numerical functions,
> and in fact we have made good progress over the past several years.
>

Didn't mean that we should never do numerics.  And, in fact, I think we
should be able to evaluate everything using bigfloats.  We're not there
yet  But speed is not the major concern because there are many systems out
there that already do that and probably better than maxima can ever do
(because we very likely need to marshal data back and forth).

On the other hand, if we have a decent method to make things fast, we
should do that and not intentionally make it slow. :-)  Lapack is one of
the things that we are reasonably fast, but making it really fast as in
octave or others would be pretty hard.

Ray