From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2007-10-17T14:59:59+09:00
Subject: Re: mathematics and physics

Jason Bornhoft wrote:
> This is a very interesting post for me and I hope that it generates a 
> lot more interest.
> 
> Personally, I would like to see Ruby go as far as LAPACK or BLAS.  So 
> much so, that I think I will end up personally investing time in such a 
> project (or create my own) in the not-to-distant future.

I've been chipping away at the edges of this for a couple of years. From 
what I've seen, once the Ruby 1.9 virtual machine/engine is stable, 
we'll be able to talk about doing science in Ruby without having to hook 
into off-board C libraries. But until that day, your best bet is

a. Learn SWIG (http://www.swig.org)
b. Find a high-performance C library that does what you want to do.
c. Build your interface and enjoy the fruits of SWIG's labors. :)

It's easy enough to interface Ruby to libraries directly, of course, but 
the nice part about SWIG is that with one interface descriptor, you can 
drive the library from any reasonable scripting language: Ruby, Python, 
Perl, PHP, Lua, Pike, several implementations of Scheme, Java and a few 
others I've forgotten.

But Python does have a one- or two-year jump on Ruby in this area, so 
we're likely to be playing catch-up. But Python also seems to have a 
commanding lead over Perl -- other than the Perl Data Language, which is 
mostly for image processing, there isn't much in Perl.