Re: Roadmap to 3.8.N

[Daniel Carrera]

Hi Jordi

On 8 November 2012 17:57, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <address@hidden> wrote:

Please see this discussion

    http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/4-0-release-goals-td4645988.html
...
Here is one success story for Scipy:

    http://hplgit.github.com/edu/uiopy/uiopy.html

Interesting. Thanks for the links.

 

> but the terminal on Windows is just terrible and
> ugly and I don't think I would get very far if I tried to push that.

Does it have to be Windows? The story above indicates that students
are just as happy with Ubuntu virtual machines.

Well, a lot of students have Ubuntu or Mac on their laptops, but the computer lab is Windows. A virtual machine is not impossible, but I figure that more students will not bother.

I cannot force kids to use Octave, and the school gives them access to MATLAB student edition "for free". My angle is that half of the computer lab has older Windows XP computers which do not have MATLAB on them. Tomorrow I'm going to install Israel's Octave-UPM on them so they become available for lab exercises. In the last lab we didn't have enough MATLAB computers so I had to ask people who had laptops to use their laptops while half the computers in the lab were just left there gathering dust. Installing Octave-UPM on those computers seems like an easy, non-controversial step I can take.

 

> On a slight tangent, Octave 3.8 will have a JIT compiler for loops. Does
> that mean that Octave and MATLAB will have about the same speed from that
> point on?

To some extent. The JIT compiler currently doesn't compile many
things, but it also does compile others. It depends on the kind of
loops you have.

Ok, thanks. We don't need high performance, I was just curious.

 

Is there anything you can do to help us implement JIT
compilation of more things? Do you have any colleagues who may be
interested in compilers and LLVM that you could send our way?

I would love to, but there is not much we can do to help. I don't know anyone who knows a lot about compilers. We are astronomers. Some of use work with Fortran 95 / High Performance Computing, and others work with Java to do data analysis for satellites. There may be compiler people in the engineering faculty, but I don't know anyone there.

Cheers,

Daniel.

--
I'm not overweight, I'm undertall.