Yesterday at the MSLUG meeting Houman Zolfaghari gave an interesting
talk on the use of Scheme in the "real-world". In his presentation he
said that in his work he uses both C++ and Scheme; the parts that do
floating-point intensive computations are programmed in C++ and the
scripts are written in Scheme. An audience member asked why Scheme
was not being used for the numerical computations. Houman stated, as
if it was common knowledge, that C++ had better performance than
Scheme on numerical computations. I have heard this misconception
from several people, and I am compelled to set the record straight, at
least to the MSLUG members who should know better.
Brad Lucier has been using Gambit-C for floating-point intensive
computations for a long time. His involvement with Gambit-C has
helped me improve the compiler's performance on numerical
computation. For the kind of computations that he does (partial
differential equations) the performance of Gambit-C is equal to that
of C. The short paper he wrote on the subject, presented at the 2000
Scheme workshop, is:
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/matthias/Scheme2000/lucier.ps
Of course the performance compared to C++ might be different for
different numerical computations. The important message here is that
the performance of floating point code can be in the same ballpark as C
++. If some computational kernels are critical to overall
performance, it might even be possible to beat C++ by doing some
agressive loop unrolling and function inlining of the kernel (which
Gambit-C does automatically based on programmer declarations).
Marc
Greetings,
this is the official announce for the next meeting of the MSLUG.
What: Montreal Scheme/Lisp User Group Meeting
Where: Room 3195, André-Aisenstadt Building, Université de Montréal,
2920 chemin de la Tour
(you can find a plan of the UdeM campus here:
http://www.stcum.qc.ca/metro/images/c56.pdf)
When: December 5th 2007 at 7pm
We will have the chance to hear 4 different talks, of around 15 to 20
minutes each, about using Scheme and Lisp in a commercial setting.
After the talks, those of us who feel so inclined will go down to a
nearby pub to have a beer and continue the discussion.
The meeting is open to everyone, feel free to invite friends and co-workers!
See you next Wednesday,
Guillaume
* Talks Program *
1- Houman Zolfaghari : Using scheme in the industry: a possibly
powerful but difficult choice
Having used scheme/lisp for more than 12 years in the industry for
some large scale projects, I will talk a bout my experience and my
latest considerations and conclusions.
----------
2- Dominique Boucher : Scheme in the enterprise: pitfalls to avoid
In this short presentation, I will share my experience introducing
Scheme in an industrial setting. I will mainly focus on how to avoid
some common pitfalls.
----------
3- Daniel Villeneuve & Alain Marcotte : Three goals, 2 companies, 1 ...
Overview of 3 utilizations of scheme in two different companies where
scheme is part of delivered products. A glance at the architecture
and environment for those products.
Survol de 3 utilisations de scheme à travers 2 entreprises:
Micro-Intel (Cogniscience) et ADOPT (Kronos). Survol de
l'environnement et architecture où scheme fait partie des produits
livrés.
----------
4- Guillaume Cartier :
Overview of the Chyma Scheduler, a rule-based scheduler for hospitals
written for IsaiX Technologies using JazzScheme under its new open
source license.
I will also discuss how it has been possible for us on various
occasions to help clients with Lisp based solutions when the hurt was
considerable and Lisp was seen as the only doctor with potent enough
medicine.
Je ne pourrais malheureusement pas m'y rendre mais le sujet m'intéresse
beaucoup, est-ce que quelqu'un pensait filmer le présentations?
Unfortunately I won't be able to make it. Was anyone planning to film the
sessions?
yl