Owl – An OCaml Numerical Library

Re:Owl – An OCaml Numerical Library by m-j-fox on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @06:17PM (#14757160)

I find this design clean and appealing. Compared to the current fashion of all these Python libraries, it's a breath of fresh air. But I wonder if it can work. Python has going for it: kitchen sink of tools, easy to learn, tooling that took 20 years to develop, you already know it.

Question: What's wrong with Matlab? Is it that it's closed and costs money? Other than that it seems clean, purpose-built, complete and not really expensive. Why all the open-source attempts to replace it?

I really thought Julia was going to do that, but it's been years and they never got the tooling. They never solved the ridiculous, self-inflicted problem of having to recompile the entire system every time you run it. You're code will execute in 300ms, but only after 10 minutes of compiling. (Or did they make progress? I haven't checked in in a while.)

Anyway, serious question: Why not Matlab?

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Re:Owl – An OCaml Numerical Library by 2309kdujj on Wednesday July 12, 2017 @06:40PM (#14757292)

Julia's improved a lot on the issue you're mentioning, so you might want to give it a try again. I don't notice it anymore, although I used to. I do think Julia's performance, while pretty impressive, isn't quite what it's been billed as. How it compares to other systems in that regard, I don't know.

As for Matlab, I think the big turnoff for me is its closed-source nature, which is maybe a more serious problem than you're giving it credit for. I also think that things like Python, that are more general-purpose, integrate much better than Matlab into other systems (e.g., web systems--you might not think it would matter if your estimation program doesn't integrate into a web app easily, but I didn't either and now I'm very sensitive to it). This is partially due to the open-source nature of things like Python, which lends itself to competition and experimentation, but also it being a more general-purpose language (this latter point is another sticking point with Julia, although wouldn't apply to OCaml).

This OCaml library is really beautiful, actually. I looked into OCaml several years ago for this sort of thing, and if it had been around then, I might have invested more in it at the time, and kept using it. I'll have to revisit it.

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Re:Owl – An OCaml Numerical Library by gaius on Thursday July 13, 2017 @02:40AM (#14759214)

I think the big turnoff for me is its closed-source nature

Well, the issue of open-vs-closed is less clear with things like MATLAB. Sure you can't download it for free-as-in-beer, but if you own a copy, you are free to inspect its source code, as MATLAB is mainly written in MATLAB (same for Mathematica and other similar packages).

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Re:Owl – An OCaml Numerical Library by tavert on Thursday July 13, 2017 @03:17AM (#14759358)

A subset of non-performance-critical functions, and things like argument validation layers, are written in m code that you can read. Most of the actual work happens in obfuscated p code or calls into compiled libraries. Many of those libraries are available independently of Matlab, but you can't see how they're calling them, or important details like how the Matlab interpreter or JIT compiler work.

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Re:Owl – An OCaml Numerical Library by cttet on Thursday July 13, 2017 @12:08AM (#14758617)

The lack of a proper package management system is the reason I stop using and recommending Matlab.

It was my favorite because of its excellent documentation and community support.

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