Re: Roadmap to 3.8.N

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On 8 November 2012 11:14, Daniel Carrera <address@hidden> wrote:
> Summary:  I'm excited about the 3.8 release. Can anyone guess when 3.8 might
> come out?

Please see this discussion

    http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/4-0-release-goals-td4645988.html

> I have been using Octave for simple work for a number of years. I have now
> begun teaching the MATLAB portion of an astronomy course at my university
> (Lund University). The students can do the exercises in any programming
> language they want, but we *teach* MATLAB, so there is naturally a strong
> pull toward MATLAB. I am not the official in charge of the course, but I
> have been giving some thought to how we could replace MATLAB by a Free
> Software alternative.

Here is one success story for Scipy:

    http://hplgit.github.com/edu/uiopy/uiopy.html

> but the terminal on Windows is just terrible and
> ugly and I don't think I would get very far if I tried to push that.

Does it have to be Windows? The story above indicates that students
are just as happy with Ubuntu virtual machines.

> On a slight tangent, Octave 3.8 will have a JIT compiler for loops. Does
> that mean that Octave and MATLAB will have about the same speed from that
> point on?

To some extent. The JIT compiler currently doesn't compile many
things, but it also does compile others. It depends on the kind of
loops you have. Is there anything you can do to help us implement JIT
compilation of more things? Do you have any colleagues who may be
interested in compilers and LLVM that you could send our way?

- Jordi G. H.