Agustin Barto wrote:
I was just taking a look at
http://freemat.sourceforge.net/
and it looks promising. What do you think about it?
I hadn't heard of it before, so I tried it. Here are my comments:
First I tried to compile it myself, but I couldn't get it to work. I had
the necessary QT4 installed, but there seem to be some problems with the
configure script that I won't go into here. After giving up on
compiling, I downloaded the precompiled Linux binary and tried it.
It looks very similar to Sebastien's Octave Workshop, probably because
both are trying to look like the Matlab IDE. It supports
multidimensional arrays, cell arrays, and sparse matrices. One of the
major deficiencies is that many functions that I consider relatively
basic are missing, like filter. Of course it also lacks the large
library of add-on functions available in octave-forge, which I use a
lot. It has a 2-D plotting tool that works reasonably well, but no 3-D
plotting.
I did a few quick speed tests. Linear algebra was slower, not
surprisingly since I use ATLAS with Octave, the binary I tested was
statically linked to BLAS. To test FOR loops, I tried "tic; a=1; for
b=1:1000000; a=a+1; end; toc". In Matlab, this takes 0.8 seconds, in
Octave 4 seconds, and in FreeMat 28 seconds. There appears to be help
available via a browser-style interface, but the help available from the
command line seems to be missing for a lot of functions.
There are some menu buttons and built-in editor which suggest that it
may support integrated debugging, but I didn't try to test it. I'll keep
emacs, thank you.
So, in summary, this does look promising, but I'm staying with Octave.
There are a few GUI-oriented features that Octave doesn't have, which I
don't really miss, and which may be available soon in Octave Workshop
anyway.
-Quentin
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