Re: How to make GNU Guile more successful

[Jan Wedekind <jan@wedesoft.de>]

One could implement something like Theano+NumPy with GNU Guile. I am trying to do something like that (github.com/wedesoft/aiscm) but I am doing it in my spare time only. Theoretically GNU Guile is better suited for this than Python because of macros.

On July 14, 2017 10:54:45 PM GMT+01:00, Linas Vepstas <linasvepstas@gmail.com> wrote:
>On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 2:28 PM, Panicz Maciej Godek
><godek.maciek@gmail.com
>> wrote:
>
>>
>> someone
>> responded critically: "are there out of the box libraries to estimate
>a
>> zero inflated negative
>> binomial regression model in guile". Of course, if I knew what a
>> zero-inflated
>> negative binomial regression model, I could deliver an implementation
>by
>> just explaining
>> the notions used in that phrase.
>
>
>Caution: the message below sounds negative.  Sorry, I use guile daily
>and
>almost exclusively now. So there ...
>
>Lack of decent science libraries for scheme is a major stumbling block,
>for
>me. Simply having sine and cosine is not enough.   I got excited (a
>decade
>ago) when I realized that guile supported GnuMP, and then rapidly
>deflated
>when I realized it only supported integers and rationals in GnuMP .. I
>work
>with arbitrary-precision floats.  Or, I did back then.
>
>Maybe more important is making guile work well with large-RAM setups.
>Currently, I do data analysis, every day, in guile, on datasets that
>take
>20GB or 40GB -- my current one is 110GB when loaded in RAM, and guile
>starts getting buggy, crashy and slow when working at that size.
>Sometimes, it starts calling GC half-a-dozen times per second, for no
>apparent reason, eating up 6 cores (or more!) doing nothing but GC.
>Why?
>Who knows? Who can tell?
>
>Yes, I have a machine with 256 GB RAM and a few dozen cores, and SSD's
>that
>hold the data, but every time guile crashes, I have to wait an hour for
>the
>data to reload.  I can live with it, but its a dirty secret I would not
>share with guile wannabe users.
>
>String handling in guile is a disaster area: If I give it a
>10-megabyte-long string in utf8, it promptly tries to convert all of
>that
>string in utf32, for utterly pointless reasons. This just makes it
>slow.
>
>There are still bugs between GC and the compiler: if call (eval "(some
>stuff) (other stuff)")  the compiler will try to compile that string
>(after
>it was converted ti utf32!) and if GC happens to run at just that
>moment,
>guile crashes or hangs.  These bugs need to be fixed.
>
>So although its a good start, there's a lot of work left until it can
>get
>to "the next level". And that work can't happen until guile is more
>popular. So it's very much chicken-and-egg scenario.
>
>--linas

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