[Pharo-users] Numerical Methods in Pharo without FFI ?

> I agree with using Smalltalk when we can, and avoid FFI, except maybe
> one thing...
>
> In Smalltalk, we could completely eliminate the Float primitives and
> emulate them with Integer arithmetic.
> But we don't.
>
> IMO we should adopt same pragmatic approach with basic operations on
> vectors/matrices, and maybe also for more involved algebra.
I think so too.
A bit in the direction of WordArray or FloatArray?
>
> The guys of LAPACK decided to use a "primitive" layer BLAS because the
> FORTRAN compiler was too naive to compete with specially crafted
> optimizations like that of MKL.
What is MKL?
Marcus is telling to me since years that we should use a good math
libraries like the one developed by some inria groups.
> It does not make sense to compete in this area, our language is not
> taylored for number crunching whatever the JIT efforts we can make,
Agreed.
Now what would be interesting to know is: what kind of operations do we
need to attack vectorised CPU
I do not remember their name but I was talking with Philippe Mougin the
father of F-Script and he wanted
to map his F-Script messages to vector on CPU to get all the power for
crunching numbers.
>
> So let's use some kind of numeric primitives.
Which ones?
Do you have some cycles to produce a prototype so that we can learn?
> That's how Matlab, NumPy, R or evry other interpreter would do it,
> don't they?
I would love to have
     - knowledge
     - and time

Sadly I just have the energy for simple things.
> It may be interesting to have some fallback code written in Smalltalk,
> but it ain't gonna scale.
Indeed.
> So don't forget that Smallapack could leverage number crunching,
> that's what it's made for...
Should we put under the umbrella once we clean SciPharo?
Because it should be reorganized first.

stef