Re: [Maxima-discuss] Qepmax package: interface to Qepcad

[Richard F. <fa...@be...>]

On 4/18/2014 10:34 AM, Robert Dodier wrote:
> On 2014-04-17, Richard Fateman <fa...@be...> wrote:
>
>> It may be that SAC-2 is much more efficient in all of these things
>> than Maxima, but that is not at all guaranteed.   It could be that
>> the essential part of QEPcad B can be coded in Maxima's language,
>> or coded in Lisp, in a few pages, given that Maxima already
>> has most of the major components.
> That's an interesting idea. I glanced at the QEPCAD B source code
> and SAClib as well. SAClib is a C++ library and QEPCAD is a C++
> program which uses it. SAClib has a lot of functions which are in
> Maxima, in particular stuff for manipulating polynomials. It seems
> plausible that SAClib could be reimplemented to punt to Maxima

This was not what I was suggesting.  Rather, the front end would be 
rewritten in
Maxima's language or in Lisp, and would call Maxima  (or Lisp). Equivalent
functionality is already in there.

Saclib presumably has its own memory management (reference counts, if 
Collins
follows the same pattern as his earlier work), and comes with its own 
baggage.
Whether it is fast or not --- I don't know.  However, no one else other 
than Collins'
students seem to have used it. e.g. not Singular, CoCoa, NPL, GMP, etc.

Replacing calls to Saclib with calls to Lisp sounds like a clumsy way of 
getting
things done.  Too many structure reformattings.

> (although as usual probably the last 10% would take forever).
> Then presumably QEPCAD itself would have to be translated to
> Maxima, although maybe that could be automated by parsing the C++
> code and emitting equivalent Maxima expressions ... just daydreaming.
>
> Since all that stuff is C++, it is susceptible to Lisp FFI. Doubtless
> that's more efficient that calling it as an external program.
>
> best
>
> Robert Dodier
>
>
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