How to Speed Up Octave?

[Bill Denney]

OK, so this topic is discussed fairly often, but I want to see what can 
be done to make the topic go away:

How can we speed up Octave?  I know that for loops are slow.  Why is 
this (I know about the JIT compiler that matlab has-- I'm asking about 
where the speed issues are), and where I can look at code to possibly 
make them faster?  The reason I'm bringing this up is that I have some 
un-vectorizable code that takes many minutes in octave and <5 seconds in 
matlab.  From code reading so far, I think that I'm interested in the 
pt-*.cc files, especially pt-loop.cc and the tree_walker class.

Am I looking in the right places (should I be looking at the 
octave_value class or somewhere else)?  Is there a point in looking 
(i.e. is it fixable)?

Bill