I only meant that for number crunching a higher level language than C can have benefits. I have a background in a language that started out as a 4GL and later incorporated OO. Number crunching was not it’s strongest point either, they used calls to C or C++ libraries for that also. So I guess I read the same answer as you.
For the rest I don’t understand Jose’s answer completely (but I don’t have a need myself).
StefanHoutzager
0
mchenini
Or you may consider calling Julia from Elixir, a relatively new scientific language, close to C in performance.
Form the Julia website: (http://julialang.org/),
<Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library. Julia’s Base library, largely written in Julia itself, also integrates mature, best-of-breed open source C and Fortran libraries for linear algebra, random number generation, signal processing, and string processing…>
But not sure how it can be called from Elixir.
Regards.
1
mchenini
Julia: http://julialang.org/
“Julia is a high-level, high-performance dynamic programming language for technical computing, with syntax that is familiar to users of other technical computing environments. It provides a sophisticated compiler, distributed parallel execution, numerical accuracy, and an extensive mathematical function library. Julia’s Base library, largely written in Julia itself, also integrates mature, best-of-breed open source C and Fortran libraries for linear algebra, random number generation, signal processing, and string processing.”
0
gpb
i was recently talking with a trader friend working at one of the bigger banks. His work involves alot of computation-intensive modeling and simulations for options pricing, and he mentioned they have moved to GPU server farms. Pretty much they are using C/C++ with the NVIDIA CUDA runtime API, I am guessing for the reasons Jose Valim mentioned (ease of huge matrix computation, ability to use pointers on mutable data structures, etc).
Here is a brief paper describing the space, if you are interested:
3
OmanF
Can someone confirm/deny possibility of calling Julia from Elixir?
I’ve dabbled with Julia awhile, it’s “Elixir-cool”. 
Can’t say the same for C/C++ (and both Rust and Nim have a lot of library catch-up to do before they have C/C++'s math coverage).
Being able to call Julia would be a great benefit.
But is it possible yet?
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sasajuric
Author of Elixir In Action
You can integrate pieces of code written in other languages in a couple of ways. My first choice is always a port. I’ve blogged a bit about it here. Another options is to run in-process C code through NIF. See here for a good explanation. It looks like Julia can be embedded so both options should be possible.
4
bbense
There is also the scheduling issue with NIF’s. Any function you provide via a NIF needs to run in roughly a millisecond to avoid bolixing the standard scheduler. See the section around “Long running NIF’s” in
This makes embedding potentially very long running math routines difficult. There are a couple ways around this, “dirty schedulers” is the most promising but that is still experimental.
Depending on the exact use case it may make the most sense to use Elixir as a scheduler and use the underlying file system as the data transport. (i.e. build an input file, monitor the math heavy program and read the results in when done.)
1
riverrun
Depending on the nature of the code you are using, you can handle scheduling issues without a dedicated scheduler.
You can see an example here of how you can replace a for loop with a recursive function, written in Elixir, which calls the bf_expand NIF. Each call to bf_expand is very short, so there are no scheduling issues.
This not always possible, though, and I’m going to be using dirty schedulers for another app I’m working on.
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sasajuric
Author of Elixir In Action
flajann2
I took a brief look at Julia, and from what I could tell it did not support or leverage multicore computers. How can it be “high performance” if it only runs on a single core? Or did I miss something?
0