Re: [Gretl-devel] basic Julia support
Am 21.01.2016 um 21:02 schrieb Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti:
Oh, it's very easy. All these super-fast languages use some form of JIT.
The big difference between Matlab and Octave, for example, comes from
Octave being a classic interpreted language, while Matlab switched to a
microcode+VM architecture some time ago. Julia just happens to be build
on top of LLVM, which is a notoriously fast VM.
Ok, but why then do many (?) examples here show the same speed between
hansl (interpreted) and Julia (JIT-compiled)? Are the examples so tiny
that the JIT overhead outweighs the other speed gains, or what's going on?
In principle, Hansl could display similar performance, if we had the
resources to rewrite the whole interpreter code as a front end to LLVM.
Believe me, it's a HUGE job.
I believe you, and I am continuing to admire the extent to which gretl
is competitive or more in terms of speed. At the end of the day,
however, the underlying reason doesn't matter for the customers. Perhaps
it will become necessary, for example, to allow some foreign language
also in gretl function packages, when that enables the package author to
work around a serious speed bottleneck. (The value added of the foreign
language of course would have to be demonstrated in the concrete case.)
thanks,
sven