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Comment by kwhitefoot | Hacker News Reader

> You mentioned NumPy. NumPy is great, and there is basically no Java equivalent.

Things like this are the greatest disappointment to me after fifty years of writing software. It should not be necessary that Java equivalent exists. It really ought to be possible to connect to libraries from any language by now.

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After fifty years of writing software, i would have thought you would understand why that wasn't possible.

Perhaps you could enlighten me as to why it isn't possible? I do understand that it would be difficult.

WinRT is an interesting thing on that front, though I am not aware of a non-Windows equivalent, and so it's never really going to see much open source adoption, let alone support on other platforms.

Back in the '90s, when we still remembered how to dream, we had CORBA.

CORBA got a lot of bad press, but towards the end, it was actually pretty decent. Certainly the best way to do the thing it was trying to do!

What do you mean? JBlas exists. Colt exists. There's probably others but I'm not super up to date on Java things.

Numpy is just wrappers for BLAS and LAPACK.

> Numpy is just wrappers for BLAS and LAPACK.

Certainly not. I encourage you to have a look at the API of BLAS/LAPACK to perform basic operationa. And that just scratches the surface.

https://numpy.org/doc/stable/user/building.html

It is. Maybe it's a very fancy wrapper.

I would argue that numpy is a fancy wrapper for BLAS in the same way that a Spitfire is a fancy wrapper for a Rolls-Royce Merlin 61.

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