Re: Performance: Octave vs. Matlab

[John Eaton]

address@hidden wrote:

: A few days ago, I got an OS/2 version of octave 1.1 and it was quite
: good.  However, after giving a few tests, I found it very slower than 
: Matlab for Windows.  About 3 times slower on a P90.  I failed to find 
: a doc that mentioned about performance issue to see if I could boost 
: Octave's performance.
:
: A free software can be slower or faster than a commercial product,
: but 3X slower speed was too big for me to understand.

Why?

: (I suspect that the OS/2 port might not be optimized when compiling.)
: With such slow speed, I doubt I would use octave in a real application.

Why not?  There are many things that Octave does that are as fast or
faster than Matlab, and even some things that Octave can do that
Matlab can't.

I think there are many reasons to choose to use Octave that have
nothing to do with speed.  In fact, if you are after really fast
solutions, any interpreted language like Octave, RLaB, Scilab, Matlab,
or U-Name-it-Lab :-), is probably not your best bet anyway.

: Maybe I missed something as I don't yet know octave enough.
: I want your comments.  Thanks.

You might want to read the comments I made in an earlier message to
this list

  http://www.che.utexas.edu/octave-mailing-lists/help-octave/1995/64

and also available via anonymous ftp from ftp.che.utexas.edu in the
directory /pub/octave/MAILING-LISTS/help-octave/1995.

Thanks,

jwe