Re: Ocaml for Scientific computing

["Mike Lin" <mikelin@mit.edu>]

On Sep 25, 7:11 am, Alex Mikhalev <a.mikha...@cranfield.ac.uk> wrote:
> Dear all,
> I am wondering is anyone using Ocaml for scientific computing? I didn't
> mean parsing, but for number crunching applications, like signal/image
> analysis. Is it suitable for this kind of tasks in general? I would like
> to hear from someone practically using it, not just theoretical
> possibility.

I use it for a lot of genome sequence processing, comparative genomics
and phylogenetic modeling. Algorithmically this involves conditional
random fields (for which I have my own library) and some linear
algebra and numerical optimization (for which I use Lacaml and
ocamlgsl). I had a lot of frustrations at first, but it's been better
since we got exception stack traces and ocaml+twt.

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. I
can see how this may be a bottomless pit for the dev team though,
since I would probably always feel like we are one crucial
optimization short of not having to rewrite that tight loop in C.

In any case though, I work in a group where everyone else uses Python,
so I'm already beating their pants off :o)

Mike