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Comment by FractalLP | Hacker News Reader

I'd love for it to go more mainstream with a high performance open source implementation. Dyalog is pretty good, and I like J, but feel the missing symbol leaves something out. K/Q with kdb+ is too expensive, and the other open source array language implementations (Qnial, Klong, Kona, GNUAPL)are just not there.

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How is GNU APL not there? It is standards compliant, 99.9% pure APL2 (per ISO standards), and is actively maintained (bugs and issues are usually turned around in a day or two). It performs quite well, and can be easily extended. I have even added memmap vectors to it to achieve even more performance (and to begin GPGPU integration).

GNU APL also supports a library version (libapl.so) which allows APL2 to be incorporated into other applications via C ffi. This is my primary use case -- interactive development followed by delivery via libapl.so.

I think it requires a more expert user. I couldn't get the manual install process to work on Ubuntu and I believe it requires MinGW or Cygwin to work on Windows (not for a beginner either). Don't get me wrong, I'm really really glad it is there.

Kx could be much bigger if they open sourced the q interpreter, tapped into a larger developer pool who could write libraries and add ons. There's more money in selling consulting services than licenses...

As much as I would love that, I do not think getting bigger is an issue for Kx. It seems to me they are doing quite well with their current model.

I have read before (sorry, I do not have the link) that Arthur Whitney does not really believe in open source. That is unfortunate (and a mistake, if you ask me). Even if he did not release a complete product, I would like to study his code. Reading and trying to understand kparc.com/b/ is a very enlightening experience. I wish k.c was there too.

From what I understand, they've made millions off of the big banking clients and that is probably quite straightforward as opposed to making money off open source.

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