From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id NAA16787 for caml-red; Thu, 19 Oct 2000 13:33:40 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id NAA16708 for ; Thu, 19 Oct 2000 13:29:52 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from pcrm.win.tue.nl (pcrm.win.tue.nl [131.155.69.41]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id e9JBToD08251 for ; Thu, 19 Oct 2000 13:29:51 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from pcrm (stephan@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by pcrm.win.tue.nl (8.9.3/8.9.3/SuSE Linux 8.9.3-0.1) with SMTP id NAA22130; Thu, 19 Oct 2000 13:32:10 +0200 From: Stephan Houben Reply-To: stephanh@win.tue.nl Organization: Scientific Computing Group To: Chris Hecker , Pierre.Boulet@lifl.fr (Pierre.Boulet) Subject: Re: single-precision floats, etc. Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2000 13:28:19 +0200 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.0.28] Content-Type: text/plain Cc: caml-list@inria.fr References: <4.3.2.7.2.20001016110744.01e9d660@shell16.ba.best.com> <4.3.2.7.2.20001018081700.033cdef0@walt> In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20001018081700.033cdef0@walt> MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: <00101913321002.20543@pcrm> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: weis@pauillac.inria.fr On Wed, 18 Oct 2000, Chris Hecker wrote: > >I think that maybe what you are looking for is the bigarray library > >that appeared with ocaml 3.00. > > I looked at that, but I really wanted to do the actual operations in caml code, not in a library (if possible). So, I'd like to write an LU decomposition routine in caml that's as fast as C code (or close enough), for example. Going out to another language is inconvenient at best, compared to just writing down the code you want (like you would in C). But even 32 bit floats cannot be represented as an unboxed ML value, since you need at least 1 other bit to tell you that it's not a pointer. (Otherwise the precise GC will get confused.) This could of course be remedied if Caml switched to a conservative GC, but then GC performance would go down the drain. -- ir. Stephan H.M.J. Houben tel. +31-40-2474358 / +31-40-2743497 e-mail: stephanh@win.tue.nl