Re: octave loop slowness (was "")

[John W. Eaton]

On 17-Mar-2006, Jordi Gutierrez Hermoso wrote:

| Of all the complaints I have heard about Octave, its slowness is the
| one that stings the most painfully. Cuts deep. Real deep.
| 
| So, I'm interested to know, any idea why this is happening? Why would
| a simple for loop with no code to execute except running through all
| the values of its iterator take orders of magnitude more in Octave
| than in Matlab?

I can think of a few possibilities:

  * because Octave's author only knows how to write a naive
    interpreter and is too busy with other tasks to spend a lot of
    time improving the interpreter (do you have a better one?)

  * no interpreter/compiler wizards have appeared on the scene with
    anything better

  * people who have paid actual money for Octave's development have
    cared more about features, correct results, and the fact that
    Octave is freely available than speed (which has apparently been
    good enough for them)

  * our army of programmers is damn small and underfunded

Now, what can you do about it?  Would you like to help, or just
complain?

jwe



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