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What's your view on the mountains of scientific code that depend on proprietary math kernels and in some cases proprietary compiler platforms?
by spamizbad 17y ago
What's your view on the mountains of scientific code that depend on proprietary math kernels and in some cases proprietary compiler platforms?
- lutorm 17y agoAs you may guess, I'm unhappy about it. In astronomy, almost everyone uses IDL, which is a proprietary, closed-source language. (It also sucks, but that's beside the point.) I think this is bad, because it locks practically the entire research field into a closed platform. (Though GDL is working to be a replacement. I don't know how conformant it is, though.) Still, I think this is less of a problem than the high-level scientific code. Most of the low-level functionality is pretty simple and (hopefully) much better tested than most scientific codes.