Lua at INFORMS

[Geoff Leyland <geoff_leyland@...>]

Hi List,

I gave my talk on Rima [1] at INFORMS [2] on Monday (US time) to a fairly small audience, but there's been some follow up since.  There's a large Python presence in math modelling so I get a few questions about why I don't just use Python.

At the moment I'm trying to work on a binding to a nonlinear solver that will use automatic differentiation to generate derivatives of objectives and constraints, and then compile those with LuaJIT.  If it works, it should be faster than the C interfaces to that solver, which have to walk an expression tree every time to evaluate.  If I get it working (jetlagged and short of sleep) it should be a nice demonstration of one of the many reasons I prefer Lua to Python.

Cheers,
Geoff

[1] http://code.google.com/p/rima/downloads/list
[2] http://meetings2.informs.org/austin2010/