Which D features to emphasize for academic review article

Andrei Alexandrescu SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org
Sun Aug 12 06:42:58 PDT 2012


On 8/12/12 12:52 AM, TJB wrote:
> Thanks for bringing this back to the original topic and for your thoughts.
>
> Indeed, a lot of econometricians are using MATLAB, R, Guass, Ox and the
> like. But there are a number of econometricians who need the raw power
> of a natively compiled language (especially financial econometricians
> whose data are huge) who typically program in either Fortran or C/C++.
> It is really this group that I am trying to reach. I think D has a lot
> to offer this group in terms of programmer productivity and reliability
> of code. I think this applies to statisticians as well, as I see a lot
> of them in this latter group too.
>
> I also want to reach the MATLABers because I think they can get a lot
> more modeling power (I like how you put that) without too much more
> difficulty (see Ox - nearly as complicated as C++ but without the
> power). Many MATLAB and R programmers end up recoding a good part of
> their algorithms in C++ and calling that code from the interpreted
> language. I have always found this kind of mixed language programming to
> be messy, time consuming, and error prone. Special tools are cropping up
> to handle this (see Rcpp). This just proves to me the usefulness of a
> productive AND powerful language like D for econometricians!

I think this is a great angle. In our lab when I was a grad student in 
NLP/ML there was also a very annoying trend going on: people would start 
with Perl for text preprocessing and Matlab for math, and then, after 
the proof of concept, would need to recode most parts in C++. (I recall 
hearing complaints about large overheads in Matlab caused by eager copy 
semantics, is that true?)

> I am sensitive to the drawbacks you mention (especially lack of numeric
> libraries). I am so sick of wasting my time in C++ though that I have
> almost decided to just start writing my own econometric library in D.
> Earlier in this thread there was a discussion of extended precision in D
> and I mentioned the need to recode things like BLAS and LAPACK in D.
> Templates in D seem perfect for this problem. As an expert in template
> meta-programming what are your thoughts? How is this different than what
> is being done in SciD? It seems they are mostly concerned about wrapping
> the old CBLAS and CLAPACK libraries.

There's a large body of experience and many optimizations accumulated in 
these libraries, which are worth exploiting. The remaining matter is 
offering a convenient shell. I think Cristi's work on SciD goes that 
direction.


Andrei


More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list