Re: typed arrays

["M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>]

On Sun, Sep 30, 2012 at 6:00 PM, Tom <tmbdev@gmail.com> wrote:
>> because if you're in an application that has that high of performance
>> needs you're
>>
>> probably using LuaJIT anyway, and if you're interfacing with unrelated
>> C libraries you're probably dealing in C data structures already.
>
>
> Efficient numerical and matrix computing in scripting languages (Octave,
> NumPy, R, ...) works by having a standard array type that every library
> uses.  No access to C data types is needed beyond that, and LuaJIT really
> doesn't help (I've never used it in any application).

I don't know about Octave or NumPy, but R has most of the low-level
number-crunching implemented in C, C++ or FORTRAN at compile time.
Wrapping C/C++/FORTRAN/Objective C libraries into R code is
well-documented and has been for a long time.

*Recently* (last year or thereabouts) R got a byte-code compiler to
make the low-level scalar stuff more efficient, but vector and matrix
operations have been done in C/C++/FORTRAN since the beginning on
UNIX, and as soon as the tools were ready on Windows.


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