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Comment by ColanR | Hacker News Reader

What limitations are there with those releases?

It's highly restrictive. If you like array languages, you should use J. It is a superior general-purpose language with GPL licensing.

https://www.jsoftware.com

vs.

https://shakti.com/license.php

Subject to Customer’s ongoing compliance with this Agreement, Shakti hereby grants to Customer a non-exclusive, non-commercial, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable, limited license for a period of 30 days (the "Evaluation Period") to download, install and run the Software for Customer’s evaluation purposes and for internal, non-commercial use only.

Eh. The performance and the notation is important to me, and I haven't seen a lot of benchmarks (or any...) indicating that J is particularly fast. And from what I understand, even Iverson eventually decided that J was a step backward from his notation-first APL.

But mostly what I'm wondering is if those downloads are 32bit-only, or time-limited in the software, or memory limited, or if it's a winzip-esque honor system limitation. Not as interested in the license.

I don't know about shakti, but kdb+/q has two different free versions. The 32-bit version is unlimited and you can use it for commercial stuff. The only restriction is that you can't run it on the cloud (whatever that means). The 64bit version is non-commercial and you must have an active internet connection to use it. In practice, I haven't found the 32bit version to be very limited, since you can still do IPC very easily.

>>The 32-bit version is unlimited and you can use it for commercial stuff. The only restriction is that you can't run it on the cloud (whatever that means).

The software license agreement for the 32-bit version specifies non-commercial use, and also still has the software time-out clause where Kx "reserves the right to insert a time-out function into the 32 Bit Kdb+ Software that will cause it to halt after a specific period of time (e.g. two hours), requiring the software to be re-started."[1]

[1] https://kx.com/download/

You won’t see any real performance comparisons because any benchmark related to kdb+ is completely restricted by its company. J without the database (Jd) is dual licensed with gpl as an option, so you can try to compare the base language by yourself for your application. But Jd again is free only for non-commercial use only.

Those shakti downloads seems to be fully functional.

Shakti has an arbitrary memory limit (like 4 GB or so).

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