The software tool GRworkbench is an ongoing project in visual, numerical General Relativity at The Australian National University. Recently, the numerical differential geometric engine of GRworkbench has been rewritten using functional programming te
chniques. By allowing functions to be directly represented as program variables in C++ code, the functional framework enables the mathematical formalism of Differential Geometry to be more closely reflected in GRworkbench . The powerful technique of `automatic differentiation has replaced numerical differentiation of the metric components, resulting in more accurate derivatives and an order-of-magnitude performance increase for operations relying on differentiation.
