Exponentiation used in division? & Some extrordinary slowness is some problems.

On 2013-12-31, Dennis Darland - student <student at dennisdarland.com> wrote:

> I do not expect maxima to be comparable to c at number crunching,
> but there are two examples in my tests that it appears would take over
> one day to complete using maxima, but take only 4 and 5 seconds
> respectively in c.

A major factor is that Maxima is probably doing something much more
general than necessary. Speeding up the code would require recognizing
that a special case is possible and then exploiting it. Maxima has some
machinery for that, but it is clumsy to use and not terribly effective.
I certainly agree that getting Maxima to run faster is a good idea, but
at present we (developers) are mostly concerned with trying to get it
to run correctly first. If you would like to work on speed, though, you
are more than welcome to do so.

best

Robert Dodier