Question

[Dominic O'Kane]

Hi All
I have a very basic question I would like to ask. Forgive me if it appears dumb.
I like Octave and the idea of contributing to this community but the speed of 
computation is an issue for me and keeps pushing me back to matlab and 
alternatives.
I realise that it is a lot of work to be done to get a fast JIT compiler.
I was wondering if it might be easier to have a built in parser that can 
convert octave code to C which can then be compiled to machine code by the 
local compiler to produce fast object files and an executable that would run at 
close to the maximum possible speed. The compilation may take a short time - 
say a minute or so.
The work flow for users would be to do all initial development and debugging 
and testing in octave but click on a "compile" button when they are ready in 
order to obtain the fast executable. 
I appreciate that this would require some clever makefile to be generated. And 
every user would need to have a c compiler on their machine.
But compared to writing a full working JIT, would this be easier ?
Regards
D


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