Re: LuaJIT2 performance for number crunching

[T T <t34www@...>]

On 18 February 2011 14:19, Leo Razoumov <slonik.az@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 18, 2011 at 07:10, T T <t34www@googlemail.com> wrote:
>> I don't know what you mean by
>> event processing, but I agree that certain algorithms do not map well
>> to MATLAB.  But discussing virtues of MATLAB (or lack thereof) is OT
>> here.
>>
>
> It is a priority queue of simulation events ordered by their time.
> Simulation event loop dispatches the events in strict temporal order.
> The events can place new events on  the queue, etc.. We ended up doing
> all this in C++.

Unless you add new events only to the end of the queue and stick to
plain arrays for implementation, I don't think you make this efficient
in MATLAB, indeed.  After all, MATLAB stands for MATrix LABoratory and
that's what it is good at.  JIT helps for an occasional loop, which
you can't express through vectorized operations, but that's about it.
Ask for more and you will be disappointed (at least as far as
performance is concerned).

> MATLAB is somewhat relevant to this list insofar it is a golden
> standard for numerical software, one of the likely LuaJIT-2
> application areas.

Fair enough.  Although, I wouldn't think of Lua(JIT) as an alternative
to Python/MATLAB/IDL/R/<insert your favourite numerical package here>.
 It would take long years to make it happen, with little benefit in
between.

Rather, I would seek to leverage Lua's strength in embeddability.  If
I could easily plug algorithms written in Lua into these other
packages ("write Lua once, run everywhere", anyone?), then this would
make for much more compelling choice.

Cheers,

Tomek