Re: is octave slow and missing functions?

[Quentin Spencer]

Karl Hammar wrote:
> I got this response re. octave as alternative to matlab:
>
>   
> > I should make a note about this; I use octave a lot at home as it's rather
> > cheap (free). It can be an alternative in some instances but there are
> > some limitations with it:
> >
> > * most importantly, the plotting system has plenty of caveats. legends
> > does not work properly, line annotation is poor, zooming panning etc is
> > missing. it is totally useless for 3D plots (workarounds exist but they
> > are rather messy IMO)
> >
> > * it runs very poorly in windows using unix emulation libraries
> >
> > * on mac, it relies on fink and macports. this installation has a few
> > problems, at least on my computer. it is not really possible to use
> > alt+tab with it since it is an X11 application.
> >
> > * there is no GUI (and the CLI lacks the very useful !-command)
> >
> > * it's rather slow compared to matlab
> >
> > * many more advanced commands are missing (convolution only works with
> > some cases for example)
> >
> > other than that I think it's rather ok. but I think it is only an
> > alternative on Linux/BSD where it came from.
> >     
>
> I don't have a Matlab license, nor MS-Windows, nor Mac so I cannot answer
> that parts. But the last two points troubles me. Are they true?
>   

The speed questions depends on what you're doing. Current versions of 
the Matlab interpreter are generally faster than octave, but they both 
use more or less the same libraries for linear algebra, FFT, sparse and 
other operations, so those operations should be about the same speed. 
Regarding the last point, I don't really know what the author is 
referring to. I suspect this is based on experience with older versions 
of octave and not the new 2.9.x releases.

Quentin