Re: moving toward a 3.0 release

[David Grohmann]

Sebastien Loisel wrote:
> I think Octave needs a new, stable release.
>
> On graphics and Windows versions: the reason I've vanished for the 
> last while was because my chosen platform (Windows + MinGW) was too buggy.
>
> Finally, someone recently noted that Matlab has fast loops. Let me 
> just add: holy matrices, Batman! Pointwise operations in Matlab are 
> faster in loop style than in vector style. There's bound to be more 
> Matlab code that won't work in Octave, not because of language 
> incompatibility, but because of huge performance differences. For 
> instance, my loop-style implementation of the Game of Life is faster 
> than my matrix-style implementation.
>
> Sebastien Loisel
Yes I can definitely say that as far as my organization goes, all the 
functionality is there or could be easily added to by our staff, *but* 
the performance of octave vs matlab in loops is so abysmal that we had 
to trash the idea of switching over. So if your goal is to increase the 
number of users of octave the most efficient way to do that is to simply 
(ok so I know its not simple) work on some kind of byte code or JIT 
backend for octave that speeds up loops.

If loops were fast, my entire research lab would switch over in an 
instant, and if any features were missing we would build them ourselves. 
We are dying to get away from matlab and all of its licensing issues. 
Vectorization is just not an option for most of the code we have.


--
David Grohmann
Senior Student Associate
Applied Research Lab : UT Austin : ESL - S206
Office: 512-835-3237