Re: speed of octave interpreter

[John W. Eaton]

On 25-Sep-2005, Brian Blais wrote:

| Stefan van der Walt wrote:
| > On Sun, Sep 25, 2005 at 01:35:23PM -0400, Brian Blais wrote:
| > 
| >>I am running Octave (2.1.71) on Linux (SuSe 9.1), and have written a
| >>simple recursive minimax example for a class, and it seemed to run very
| >>slowly.   So, on a whim, I decided to test it in Scilab 3.0, Matlab 7.0
| > 
| > 
| > Since you are dabbling with the murky art of recursion, you probably
| > want to set
| > 
| > ignore_function_time_stamp = "all"
| > 
| 
| Holy smokes!  What a difference!
| 
| >> ignore_function_time_stamp = "system";
| >> tic; nim_minimax(15); toc
| ans = 56.552
| >> ignore_function_time_stamp = "all";
| >> tic; nim_minimax(15); toc
| ans = 1.4262

I can reproduce the problem with 2.1.69, but not with my current
sources.  I'll reply to Paul Kienzle's post on the maintainers list
with some more observations.

In any case, Octave's interpreter is known to be slow for looping and
even slower for recursion.

But, have mercy.  The original goal was not to write a blazingly fast
interpreter.  The goal was to write something that would be reliable,
relatively easy to maintain and extend, and that would be useful in
a finite amount of deveopment time.  Oh, and (originally) written by
one person who was not a compiler expert.

jwe

-- 
The amazing thing about a dancing bear is not how well it dances, but
that it dances at all...



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