New programming language for fast simulations

sciencedaily.com

16 points·Zenst··6 comments

The idea of using DSLs in this field is attractive. The amount of math you have to hold in your head to really start talking about large scale simulations is staggering, and it gets more and more complicated as you scale up. There are thousands of moving parts that must be accounted for, any one of them can burn you.

I wonder however, with full respect to other groups who have made good progress in making the idea a reality, why they never attempt collaboration with computer science - a field that has been perfecting language design for so long? I remember speaking to someone doing a similar project, and they didn't even know that parsing was a "thing," yet they were implementing a DSL.

Since I'm more on the math side and not on the computer science side I can't comment on how much duplicated work is actually happening, but it seems like a lot.

In their 2014 presentation [1] they say that their compiler is implemented in C++ using flex/bison (that's a lexer/parser generator combo) so at least in this case they're aware of the standard tools.

[1] http://equelle.org/presentations/

Where is the content? This just seems like a press release.

Looks like it has it's own site: http://equelle.org/

There's a demo too: http://demo.equelle.org/

Remember that computational simulation is about performance, and these languages, Charm/Chapel loose if they are even slightly less efficient than their low-level counterparts like FORTRAN/C/C++.

The DSL reminds me of Fenics http://fenicsproject.org/

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