From help-octave-request at che dot utexas dot edu  Wed Feb  1 10:08:22 1995
Subject: Re: Octave SLOW
From: John Eaton <jwe at che dot utexas dot edu>
To: help-octave at che dot utexas dot edu
Date: Wed, 01 Feb 1995 10:08:19 -0600

It is probably true that Octave is slower than Matlab for things like
looping and function calls.  The overhead for evaluation of simple
command lists may even be slower.  I am not terribly surprised by
this since the interpreter was never really built for speed.  If
anything, it was intended to be as simple as possible to maintain and
modify (though I'm not sure that it is a complete success on that
score either).

In most cases, the performance of the basic built-in numerical
operations (those that don't require user-supplied functions to be
evaluated) should be about the same for Octave and Matlab because both
use compiled Fortran or C to handle these functions.  The only
difference would be the overhead in setting up the call to the
compiled function.  For anything but the smallest problems, that is
only a small fraction of the total time.

It would be nice to improve Octave's overall performance, and I am
sure it is possible to make it run much faster.  I am certainly
willing to listen to any specific suggestions for ways to
significantly improve Octave's performance.  At this point though, I
think there are many more important things to work on first.

Thanks,

jwe