From help-request at octave dot org Tue Dec 21 12:54:49 2004 Subject: Re: Build 2.1.64 on OS 10.3. error From: Michael Martin To: Octave Help Date: Tue, 21 Dec 2004 12:53:26 -0600 On Dec 21, 2004, at 12:22 PM, Per Persson wrote: > Sorry if I'm sounding negative, but it is my experience that applying > something as agressive[1] as the -fast option will not work well on > something as complex as octave. Caveat simulator! I second Per Persson's warning. I have had the -fast optimization optimize some of my loops right out of existence and thereby produce incorrect results. We have a number of spacecraft simulations, which have varying degrees of complexity. I ran an extensive set of test cases on our basic simulator, slowly increasing the optimization levels. The no-optimization compile was considered the baseline, and was shown to agree with the results from our solaris and sgi installations of the simulator. When I compiled on OSX, -O1 was fine, so was -O2, as was -O3, but -fast, while it was the fastest, it could not reproduce the numbers seen in the baseline. Since I would rather not have my spacecraft fall apart on me (bad for business, you know). Our make files are set to -O3 for OSX. OSX is not unique in this by any means. Our simulators run on several Unix platforms and tolerate different degrees of optimization on each platform. We run test cases to find what does and does not work for each simulator/platform/OS/compiler combination. It is different for each. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Michael W. Martin Phone: (281) 333-2177 Draper Laboratory FAX: (281) 333-5276 2200 Space Park Dr. EMail: martin at simba dot jsc dot draper dot com Houston, TX 77058 WWW: http://www.jsc.draper.com/ USA Mail Code: EG/Draper ---------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------- Octave is freely available under the terms of the GNU GPL. Octave's home on the web: http://www.octave.org How to fund new projects: http://www.octave.org/funding.html Subscription information: http://www.octave.org/archive.html -------------------------------------------------------------