[Haskell-cafe] Numerical methods in Haskell

Keean Schupke k.schupke at imperial.ac.uk
Fri Feb 10 09:39:46 EST 2006


Actually I was starting to develop a matrix library, but then I found 
someone beat me to it... which is nice of course because you can move 
straight on to using it...

http://dis.um.es/~alberto/hmatrix/matrix.html

It uses the GSL which can use an optimized cblas library for even faster 
computation.

    Regards,
    Keean.

Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> | Between google searching and looking through the activity
> | report, I take it that no one has really developed serious
> | libraries for matrix manipulations, diff eqs, etc.
> | 
> | Are there any practical reasons for this or is it just a
> | matter of the haskell community being small and there not
> | being many people interested in something so specialized?
>
> The latter I think, but it's just the sort of thing that a functional
> language should be good at.  Two other difficulties
>
> (a) It's hard to compete with existing libraries.  The obvious thing is
> not to compete; instead, just call them.  But somehow that doesn't seem
> to be as motivating.  Perhaps some bindings exist though?
>
> (b) A concern about efficiency, because numerical computation is
> typically an area where people really care about how many instructions
> you take.  It's a legitimate concern, but I don't think that it'll turn
> out to be justified.  With unboxed arrays, and/or calling external
> libraries for the inner loops -- and the potential for aggressive fusion
> and/or parallelism, there is plenty of upward potential.  I also want to
> work on nested data parallelism (a la NESL, and NEPAL) which fits right
> in here.
>
> I'd love to see a little community of matrix manipulators spinning up.  
>
> Simon
>
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