Jules Bean wrote:
Laurent Deniau wrote:
Henning Thielemann wrote:
On Tue, 13 Nov 2007, Jon Harrop wrote:
the FFT routines in MATLAB (FFTW: written in OCaml) and the SML software that The MathWorks sell.
I see, but FFTW was not developed by MathWorks, but by Matteo Frigo and Steven G. Johnson (says fftw.org),
Right, and it is not written in OCaml but in C. The OCaml code _generates_ optimized C code for the arch where it matters.
That sounds like 'written in ocaml' to me.
OCaml was used to write a meta-program which applies heuristics to minimize the runtime of the critical C code (i.e. the butterflies). This has nothing to do with FFT computation and it is optional. FFTW doesn't need any OCaml compiler or lib to be compiled and installed.
That's no more written in C than java code is written in assembly, just because the JIT generates optimised assembly code...
If your program is written in Java (resp. C) but the JIT is written in C (resp. OCaml), in which language is your code?
I would say it's "written in" the language which the authors wrote it. The fact that they wrote it to generate some C code and then compile it: well, they're just a clever bunch :-)
Effectively, they have used the right language for the right thing. a+, ld.