IPC between c++ and mathematica?

Question

I am writing a routine in C++ where I will end up having to perform a very difficult integral which I believe will be difficult/inefficient to approximate numerically.

My desire is to spawn a child process using fork() and have that process launch a Mathematica kernel to evaluate the integral. (The script will be pre-written with the variable definitions as command line arguments).

As of right now, the only thing I know to do is to have Mathematica write the final value of the integral to a file and have the parent process spin (looking for the file to be written) and then read the value of the file once it is done.

Is there a more efficient way to do this? I know there is a lot of overhead with the writing to a file and spinning until the file is complete, but I don't know how to send/receive signals with Mathematica. Is there any way to open up a piece of shared memory between Mathematica and my program so that the value can be written to memory instead of having two processes read/write a file?

Any other ideas I haven't thought of, or way to speed up this technique, would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You can use MathLink to talk to a copy of mathematica. Or you can embed mathematica libraries into your application to do the calculations.

The options are covered here, with specific references to mathlink here