JIT from FreeMat (was: Re: Mathworks-hosted GPL'd software)

[Jaroslav Hajek]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 1:44 PM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On 16 February 2010 02:20, Judd Storrs <address@hidden> wrote:
>> We intend to make your software part of the OctaveForge project so
>> that it can be used freely with GNU Octave or for other purposes.
>
> ... such as Freemat. Octave isn't the only free implementation of the
> Matlab language, (and they beat us to JIT, wonder if we could use some
> of their code).

In think I briefly inspected the FreeMat sources regarding this
possibility some year ago and my impression was that the possibilities
were close to zero. The FreeMat code has completely different and
incompatible internals, such as arrays. Maybe we could at least take
some ideas, but someone has to do it.

Personally, I think I don't need JIT compiling in Octave, because I
know C++ and Fortran well enough to arrogantly think that I can beat
JIT compilers by rewriting the critical parts of my code as compiled
functions. I'd much rather see the C++ API improved and stabilized,
and perhaps some automatic compilation of C++ functions.

Btw, amongst all the languages I know, the Matlab language seems to be
the one most unsuitable for compilation, with its dynamic typing and
scoping of functions, et cetera.

-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek, PhD
computing expert & GNU Octave developer
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz