Lush is Free Software (under the GPL license) and runs on GNU/Linux, Solaris, Irix, and Windows under Cygwin.

Lush can be used advantageously for projects where one would otherwise use a combination of an interpreted language like Matlab, Python, Perl, S+, or even (gasp!) BASIC, and a compiled language like C. Lush brings the best of both worlds by wrapping three languages into one: (1) a weakly-typed, garbage-collected, dynamically scoped, interpreted language with a simple Lisp-like syntax, (2) a strongly-typed, lexically-scoped compiled language that uses the same Lisp-like syntax, and (3) the C language, which can be freely mixed with Lush code within a single program, even within a single function. It sounds complicated, but it is not. In fact, Lush is designed to be very simple to learn and easy to use.

If you do research and development in signal processing, image processing, machine learning, computer vision, bio-informatics, data mining, statistics, simulation, optimization, or artificial intelligence, and feel limited by Matlab and other existing tools, Lush is for you. If you want a simple environment to experiment with graphics, video, and sounds, Lush is for you.

Lush's main features includes:

• A very clean, simple, and easy to learn Lisp-like syntax.
• A compiler that produces very efficient C code and relies on the C compiler to produce efficient native code (no inefficient bytecode or virtual machine).
• An easy way to interface C functions and libraries, and a powerful dynamic linker/loader for object files or libraries (.o, .a and .so files) written in other compiled languages.
• The ability to freely mix Lisp and C in a single function.
• A powerful set of vector/matrix/tensor operations.
• A huge library of over 10,000 numerical routines, including full interfaces to GSL, LAPACK, and BLAS.
• A library of image and signal processing routines.
• An extensive set of graphic routines, including an object-oriented GUI toolkit, an interface to OpenGL/GLU/GLUT, and the OpenInventor scene rendering engine.
• An interface to the Simple Directmedia Layer (SDL) multimedia library, including a sprite class with pixel-accurate collision detection (perfect for 2D games).
• Sound and video grabbing (using ALSA and Video4Linux).
• Several libraries for machine learning, neural net, statistical estimation, Hidden Markov Models (gblearn2, Torch, HTK, SVM).
• libraries for computer vision (OpenCV, Intel's open source Vision Library), and 3D scene rendering (OpenInventor).
• bindings to the JavaVM API and to the Python C API.
• Lush is Free Software.

For more specific information, have a look at this tutorial.

For our numerically enclined friends, Lush has a full interface to the GNU Scientific Library (GSL, 3500 function), and to the LAPACK and BLAS Linear Algebra libraries. This gives access to an extensive set of numerical and statistical functions (several thousand in fact).

Lush includes a full interface to the industry-standard OpenGL library that allows the creation of 3D graphics and animations. This interface include an interface to GLUT, OpenGLU, and (coming soon) OpenRM (scene graph rendering engine). This makes Lush an excellent platform to write interactive virtual reality applications, simulation software, and computer games.

Another popular library interfaced to Lush is the multimedia and game API Simple Directmedia Layer (SDL). It is enhanced by a high-level library that allows the easy manipulation of sprites and animated, movable screen objects with pixel-accurate collision detection. This library, combined with Lush's simple syntax, makes it ideal for developing simple video games and for teaching programming to children.

Lush contains a library of image processing functions to load, save, resize and resample, warp, filter, and analyze images. Mathematical morphology operations such as connected component analysis, distance transform, erosion, and dilation, are also available for bitonal images. It also includes classes and functions for easily grabbing video using the Video4Linux API. It also includes an interface to the Intel's Open Computer Vision library (OpenCV).

Lush includes a library to manipulate probabilistic finite state machines and transducers. It allows the construction of grammars and finite state machine, and well as more advanced FSM algebra operations such as graph transduction, composition, and viterbi search algorithm. It also allows gradient-based training of systems that integrate such objects, as described in LeCun, Bottou, Bengio, Haffner: gradient-based learning applied to document recognition, Proc. IEEE, 86-11, 1998.

Lush offers an extensive library for gradient-based machine learning (which is the main research interest of the authors of Lush). The list includes: neural networks (including convolutional neural networks), radial basis functions, support vector machines, and many others. This library is based on an innovative object-oriented design that allows to build large learning machines out of multiple learning modules and to train them cooperatively. Commercially used optical recognition systems have been built with this library. Lush also provides an interface to the popular Torch package which includes even more machine learning paradigms.

In addition, Lush provides various interfaces to multimedia libraries, including Video4Linux (video grabbing) and ALSA (audio recording/playing/processing).

Flush, the Lush mascot.

 What's with all the frogs?
Well, Yann LeCun and Leon Bottou are both French, and many of the past contributors have been French or French-speaking (Patrice Simard, Yoshua Bengio, Patrick Haffner, Pascal Vincent).

Years of extensive focus groups studies and consultation with top marketing experts convinced us that using an escargot would send the wrong message for an allegedly fast language.

Also, frogs are very good at catching bugs.

Cute penguins and gnus were already taken, as well as the numerous species found on the covers of O'Reilly books.

We like frogs. Really. Some of our best friends are frogs. Particularly those accompanied by garlic and butter.
[No Frog was physically harmed in the making of this page, though we probably did hurt their feelings.]

 I want to get started, is there a good tutorial on Lush?
Have a look at this tutorial.

 This site looks like a rip-off of the DjVuLibre site
Lush and DjVu were produced by the same people (in fact Lush was used to prototype the first version of DjVu). So, no rip-off, just laziness. [This page is made entirely of recycled HTML tags]