Lua is faster than Fortran???

[Felix]

On Jul 9, 12:44 am, Stefan Behnel <stefan... at behnel.de> wrote:
> Felix, 09.07.2010 05:39:
 > Well, at least its "parallel processing abilities" are quite good
actually.
> If you have really large computations, they usually run on more than one
> computer (not just more than one processor). So you can't really get around
> using something like MPI, in which case an additional threading layer is
> basically worthless, regardless of the language you use. For computations,
> threading keeps being highly overrated.

That is certainly true for large computations. But many smaller tasks
are run on single machines and it does make a difference if they take
1 minute per run or 10. The average number of cores per computer has
been increasing for quite a while now. It seems unfortunate to be
restricted to using only one of them at a time (for regular loops, not
mathematical vector operations). Python has made so many complicated
things easy, but I have not seen an easy way to parallelize a simple
loop on a multicore CPU without having to set up infrastructure and/or
incurring large overhead from many interpreters and marshalling data.
Just the fact that there is such a large number of attempts out there
to fix this suggests that something important is missing.