AMPL vs. APL vs. Lua vs. Ping-API Comparison Chart

AMPL is a powerful and intuitive modeling language designed to represent and solve complex optimization problems. It enables users to formulate mathematical models in a syntax that closely mirrors algebraic notation, facilitating a clear and concise representation of variables, objectives, and constraints. AMPL supports a wide range of problem types, including linear programming, nonlinear programming, mixed-integer programming, and more. One of its key strengths is the ability to separate models and data, allowing for flexibility and scalability in handling large-scale problems. The platform offers seamless integration with numerous solvers, both commercial and open-source, providing users with the flexibility to choose the most appropriate solver for their specific needs. AMPL is available across multiple operating systems, including Windows, macOS, and Linux, and offers various licensing options.

Lua is a powerful, efficient, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It supports procedural programming, object-oriented programming, functional programming, data-driven programming, and data description. Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode with a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping. Lua has a deserved reputation for performance. To claim to be "as fast as Lua" is an aspiration of other scripting languages. Several benchmarks show Lua as the fastest language in the realm of interpreted scripting languages. Lua is fast not only in fine-tuned benchmark programs, but in real life too. Substantial fractions of large applications have been written in Lua.