Re: [Caml-list] Re: Ocaml for Scientific computing

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

On Tuesday 25 September 2007 19:46:34 skaller wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-09-25 at 13:27 -0400, Mike Lin wrote:
> > On Sep 25, 7:11 am, Alex Mikhalev <a.mikha...@cranfield.ac.uk> wrote:
> >
> > For numerical computing, I wish ocamlopt would do at least basic loop
> > optimizations, like hoisting invariant values -- this type of stuff is
> > easily done manually, but often at the expense of code readability.
>
> Gcc does this quite well I think. However in a higher level
> procedural language (like Ocaml and Felix) it is very hard
> to get right and potentially very expensive.

I'm not sure that it is conceptually more difficult to do similar things for 
OCaml but my vote goes to hoisting bounds checks. I don't like having to 
write unsafe code by hand in OCaml and F# does a great job of improving 
performance by hoisting bounds checks.

I discussed some of the benchmarks where F# is faster than OCaml recently on 
one of our blogs:

  http://ocamlnews.blogspot.com/2007/09/spectral-norm.html

For some reason, the current implementation of spectral-norm on the shootout 
leaves out some important optimizations in OCaml. F# doesn't require these 
optimizations to be done by hand.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
OCaml for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/?e