Re: Interpreter performance

[Bill Denney]

John W. Eaton wrote:
> Looping, conditionals, and funtion calling is pretty much what the
> interpreter does.  When you do core operations on large matrices, then
> you are likely out of the realm of the interpreter.  You have one
> funtion call that does a lot of work.  The function call is still
> slow, but that is not as noticeable because your (large) operation is
> taking a lot more time, and the interpreter is doing less.
To try to make this better, would you accept patches that try to avoid 
the looping, conditionals, etc.?  I'm thinking about trying to go 
through the source tree and use cellfun instead of constructs like

if iscell (x)
 for i = 1:numel (x)
   retval(i) = function(x{i});
 endfor
endif

replace them with
if iscell (x)
 retval = cellfun ("function", x);
endif

In some tests on some of the easy-to-modify string functions, this can 
give a ~2-3x speed up.

Bill