| Between google searching and looking through the activity
| report, I take it that no one has really developed serious
| libraries for matrix manipulations, diff eqs, etc.
|
| Are there any practical reasons for this or is it just a
| matter of the haskell community being small and there not
| being many people interested in something so specialized?
The latter I think, but it's just the sort of thing that a functional
language should be good at. Two other difficulties
(a) It's hard to compete with existing libraries. The obvious thing is
not to compete; instead, just call them. But somehow that doesn't seem
to be as motivating. Perhaps some bindings exist though?
(b) A concern about efficiency, because numerical computation is
typically an area where people really care about how many instructions
you take. It's a legitimate concern, but I don't think that it'll turn
out to be justified. With unboxed arrays, and/or calling external
libraries for the inner loops -- and the potential for aggressive fusion
and/or parallelism, there is plenty of upward potential. I also want to
work on nested data parallelism (a la NESL, and NEPAL) which fits right
in here.
I'd love to see a little community of matrix manipulators spinning up.
Simon
