Hacker News Reader

Comment by JacobiX | Hacker News Reader

I really like APL but I cannot imagine myself depending on a closed source tool-chain. I've heard that the GNU APL is order of magnitude slower than Dyalog APL, but I can't find a benchmark to confirm that.

View on HN

Not to claim any are better than Dyalog, but there are options: https://aplwiki.com/wiki/List_of_open-source_array_languages . I think dzaima/APL and April are both all right. Personally, I think GNU is not a good design: for example it has no lexical scoping or even control structures, essentially requiring you to use goto for program control. BQN is my own effort and I would say it has more serious ambitions than these. If you're not attached to the APL language specifically, I'd take a look.

I check back in on your BQN project every few months. I am an anxious potential user and love the work you do.

Thank you for the comment, I wasn’t aware of the BQN project, sounds very interesting to me.

Yes, GNU APL is quite slow. There was some primitive implemented in GNU APL (as part of the interpreter, in c). A pure-APL implementation running on dyalog outperformed it by a considerable margin.

If you're looking for a performance, opensource APL, try j. Though if performance is not a priority then, as the sibling says, dzaima/apl or april should be more than adequate.

NB. I believe the primitive implemented Knuth's dancing links algorithm.

NB. NARS is also very decent, though it only runs on windows.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com