SciPy VS julia

I guess it is a rite of passage to rewrite it. I'm doing it for SciPy too together with Propack in [1]. Somebody already mentioned your repo. Thank you for your efforts.

[1]: https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/18566

Fortran codes have caused many problems for the Python package Scipy, and some of them are now being rewritten in C: e.g., https://github.com/scipy/scipy/pull/19121. Not only does R have many Fortran codes, there are also many R packages using Fortran codes: https://github.com/r-devel/r-svn, https://github.com/cran?q=&type=&language=fortran&sort=. Modern Fortran is a fine language but most legacy Fortran codes use the F77 style. When I update the R package quantreg, which uses many Fortran codes, I get a lot of warning messages. Not sure how the Fortran codes in the R ecosystem will be dealt with in the future, but they recently caused an issue in R due to the lack of compiler support for Fortran: https://blog.r-project.org/2023/08/23/will-r-work-on-64-bit-arm-windows/index.html. Some renowned packages like glmnet already have their Fortran codes rewritten in C/C++: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/glmnet/news/news.html

There are several lessons here: a) vanilla conda-forge numpy and scipy versions come with openblas, and it works pretty well, b) do not use netlib unless your matrices are small and you need to do a lot of SVDs, or idek why c) Apple's veclib/accelerate is super fast, but it is also numerically unstable. So much so that the scipy's devs dropped any support of it back in 2018. Like dang. That said, they are apparently are bring it back in, since the 13.3 release of macOS Ventura saw some major improvements in accelerate performance.

First, if you read through that scipy issue (https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/18118 ) the author was willing and able to relicense PRIMA under a 3-clause BSD license which is perfectly acceptable for scipy.

For the numerical recipes reference, there is a mention that scipy uses a slightly improved version of Powell's algorithm that is originally due to Forman Acton and presumably published in his popular book on numerical analysis, and that also happens to be described & included in numerical recipes. That is, unless the code scipy uses is copied from numerical recipes, which I presume it isn't, NR having the same algorithm doesn't mean that every other independent implementation of that algorithm falls under NR copyright.

Reading the discussions under a previous thread titled "More Descent, Less Gradient"( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23004026 ), I guess people might be interested in PRIMA ( www.libprima.net ), which provides the reference implementation for Powell's renowned gradient/derivative-free (zeroth-order) optimization methods, namely COBYLA, UOBYQA, NEWUOA, BOBYQA, and LINCOA.

PRIMA solves general nonlinear optimizaton problems without using derivatives. It implements Powell's solvers in modern Fortran, compling with the Fortran 2008 standard. The implementation is faithful, in the sense of being mathmatically equivalent to Powell's Fortran 77 implementation, but with a better numerical performance. In contrast to the 7939 lines of Fortran 77 code with 244 GOTOs, the new implementation is structured and modularized.

There is a discussion to include the PRIMA solvers into SciPy ( https://github.com/scipy/scipy/issues/18118 ), replacing the buggy and unmaintained Fortran 77 version of COBYLA, and making the other four solvers available to all SciPy users.

if that makes your eyes bleed, what do you think about this? https://github.com/scipy/scipy/blob/main/scipy/special/specfun/specfun.f (heh)

34. Julia - $74,963

I don't believe there is any official documentation on this, but https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/49430 for example added prefetching to the marking phase of a GC which saw speedups on x86, but not on M1.

3. dispatch on all the arguments

the first solution is clean, but people really like dispatch.

the second makes calling functions in the function call syntax weird, because the first argument is privileged semantically but not syntactically.

the third makes calling functions in the method call syntax weird because the first argument is privileged syntactically but not semantically.

the closest things to this i can think of off the top of my head in remotely popular programming languages are: nim, lisp dialects, and julia.

nim navigates the dispatch conundrum by providing different ways to define free functions for different dispatch-ness. the tutorial gives a good overview: https://nim-lang.org/docs/tut2.html

lisps of course lack UFCS.

see here for a discussion on the lack of UFCS in julia: https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/31779

so to sum up the answer to the original question: because it's only obvious how to make it nice and tidy like you're wanting if you sacrifice function dispatch, which is ubiquitous for good reason!

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/blob/release-1.10/NEWS.md

Visit official site: https://julialang.org/

No. It runs natively on ARM.

julia> versioninfo() Julia Version 1.9.3 Commit bed2cd540a1 (2023-08-24 14:43 UTC) Build Info: Official https://julialang.org/ release

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/51086#issuecomment...

So while this "fixes" the issue, it'll introduce a confusing time delay between you freeing the memory and you observing that in `htop`.

But according to https://jemalloc.net/jemalloc.3.html you can set `opt.muzzy_decay_ms = 0` to remove the delay.

Still, the musl author has some reservations against making `jemalloc` the default:

https://www.openwall.com/lists/musl/2018/04/23/2

> It's got serious bloat problems, problems with undermining ASLR, and is optimized pretty much only for being as fast as possible without caring how much memory you use.

With the above-mentioned tunables, this should be mitigated to some extent, but the general "theme" (focusing on e.g. performance vs memory usage) will likely still mean "it's a tradeoff" or "it's no tradeoff, but only if you set tunables to what you need".

I have asked about Julia's reproducibility story on the Guix mailing list in the past, and at the time Simon Tournier didn't think it was promising. I seem to recall Julia itself didnt have a reproducible build. All I know now is that github issue is still not closed.

https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/34753

I don't really know what kind of rebuttal you're looking for, but I will link my HN comments from when this was first posted for some thoughts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31396861#31398796. As I said, in the linked post, I'm quite skeptical of the business of trying to assess relative buginess of programming in different systems, because that has strong dependencies on what you consider core vs packages and what exactly you're trying to do.

However, bugs in general suck and we've been thinking a fair bit about what additional tooling the language could provide to help people avoid the classes of bugs that Yuri encountered in the post.

The biggest class of problems in the blog post, is that it's pretty clear that `@inbounds` (and I will extend this to `@assume_effects`, even though that wasn't around when Yuri wrote his post) is problematic, because it's too hard to write. My proposal for what to do instead is at https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/50641.

Another common theme is that while Julia is great at composition, it's not clear what's expected to work and what isn't, because the interfaces are informal and not checked. This is a hard design problem, because it's quite close to the reasons why Julia works well. My current thoughts on that are here: https://github.com/Keno/InterfaceSpecs.jl but there's other proposals also.

Doesn't musl have the same issue? https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/34726#issuecomment...

I also wonder about OSX's libc. Newer versions seem to have some sort of locking https://github.com/apple-open-source-mirror/Libc/blob/master...

but older versions (from 10.9) don't have any lockign: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/Libc/blob/Libc-99...