computing speed

[John W. Eaton]

On 30-Jul-1997, address@hidden <address@hidden> wrote:

| I am a little concerned about the speed of octave.
| Is it faster that matlab?  It seems that same program
| running on my P166 (using octave) take much more time 
| than using matlab on a workstation (with cpu speed 
| less than 166). Maybe it is only my problem? :) 
| 
| Any known conclusions here? Just be curious. Thanks. 

I suppose it depends on what your code actually does.  A direct
comparison of execution time for two different machines probably
doesn't make much sense.

Loops and function calls are slow.  Built-in functions for numerical
computations that don't involve user-supplied functions are generally
pretty fast.

Perhaps Octave's interpreter will eventually be faster.  Would you
like to help make it happen?  Funding and code are both welcome.

Thanks,

jwe