Scalala

Scalala is a linear algebra package for Scala. It is currently not actively maintained, having been superseded by Breeze. It can be found at the following website:

https://github.com/scalala/Scalala

It is right now mostly of historic interest; however, Scalala has rich MATLAB-like operators on vectors and matrices and a library of numerical routines. It also has basic support for plotting.

Breeze

Breeze is the biggest and best maintained numerical computing library for Scala. It can be found at the ScalaNLP website:

http://www.scalanlp.org/

It is developed along with Epic and Puck, the former of which is a powerful statistical parser and the latter is a GPU-powered parser for natural languages. These two later libraries will be of less concern to us. Breeze, however, is a big part of this book. It provide functionality that is roughly equivalent to the famous and widely used NumPy package for Python. It is actively maintained and is likely to remain so in the near future.

Breeze is modeled on Scalala, which was mentioned previously. It supports all the matrix and vector operations you would expect. It provides a large number of probability distributions. It also provides routines for optimization and linear equation solving as well as routines for plotting. In a later chapter, we will introduce Breeze in detail and explain to readers how to do things they have grown accustomed to in other systems in Breeze.

ScalaLab

ScalaLab is a numerical computing environment aiming to replicate the functionality of MATLAB. The website is given here:

https://code.google.com/p/scalalab/

ScalaLab will be discussed in a section dedicated to it. It supports Scala-based scripting and is written mostly in Java with some speed-critical sections written in C/C++. It allows you to access the results of MATLAB scripts. It can use dozens of Scala and Java libraries for scientific computing. There is a basic support for plotting: