[GiNaC-list] sympy, Maxima, GiNaC, and others (lament of a physicist)

[Alexei Sheplyakov]

Hello!

On Tue, Jan 01, 2008 at 02:24:33PM +0100, Ondrej Certik wrote:
> 
> I was recently at a Sage workshop, some of my notes here:
> 
> http://ondrejcertik.blogspot.com/2007/11/sage-days-6.html

I've got some comments regarding SymPy and sage, I post them here
(as 'Post a Comment' function on that page does not seem to work
properly). I hope this is not off topic on the GiNaC list.

> SAGE wraps Maxima, because Maxima is quite fast, very well tested, so it
> works well.

Although the algorithms implemented in Maxima are quite good, Maxima is
dog slow and unreasonably memory-hungry. That stems from awful memory
management facilities of the underlying LISP system (GCL). Unfortunately,
Maxima maintainers ignore these issues. So people who need to get their
calculations done were forced to write their own tools (GiNaC being one
of them).

> It's difficult to extend

That's not quite true. Maxima is just a custom LISP system (roughly, a LISP
library), so it is possible to extend it either with LISP, or (via foreign
function interface) with virtually any programming lagnuage. 

> and written in LISP and that's very bad.

Actually, that's very GOOD. One can concentrate on the problem being solved
instead of learning (the lastest version of) some programming language which
happens to be popular today.

> it's in Python,

Life is to short to learn every (ill-designed) programming language
out of there. Especially if existing programming languages (LISP/FORTRAN/C)
cover every task in a CAS (and not only CAS) programming. It's very sad that
people keep reinventing the wheel (or rather, rewriting it in their pet
programming languages) instead of improving existing tools.

> but currently slower than Maxima 

Ouch!

> rewriting parts of SymPy using Cython, or even C directly,

So, you've reimplemented GiNaC in Python, and now reimplementing that in C?
This sounds like reinventing the wheel, doesn't it?  And what's the point
of that (leaving aside having fun :)?


Best regards,
	Alexei

-- 
All science is either physics or stamp collecting.

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