4 ms·
The author mentioned that the Lisp in question and Fortran could operate at the same speed. My impression is that the big use of Fortran has always been numeric
by patmcguire 11y ago
The author mentioned that the Lisp in question and Fortran could operate at the same speed. My impression is that the big use of Fortran has always been numerical algorithms with a bunch of matrix-vector operations — is that not the case? Because if it was like against like it doesn't make any sense, but if Lisp were as fast at matrix operations I figure we still wouldn't be using LAPACK for that stuff.
- simonster 11y agoMatrix-vector operations are part of BLAS, and most performant BLAS packages (e.g. MKL and OpenBLAS) are written in assembly or machine-generated using a special-purpose codegen. You can't write the gemv/gemm kernel in any general-purpose language and expect to beat modern BLAS. But you can call BLAS/LAPACK from whatever language you want. This is how MATLAB succeeds even though it has a dog-slow interpreter.