I am now subscribed to this mailing list. Sorry for top posting last
time, it was not intentional.
On Fri, 2007-10-05 at 23:46 -0400, John W. Eaton wrote:
On 6-Oct-2007, Svante Signell wrote:
| Please interpret my message as follows: I like the efforts you put into
| the free software tool Octave, I use it every day at my home computers.
| My preference is as much free software as possible, especially Octave
| since Matlab is very expensive for everybody except universities (where
| I belong).
I prefer to focus on freedom rather than price. Octave has certainly
not been free (gratis) for me and others who have worked on it or
funded its development.
| My question is more how difficult it is to implement such a thing.
Your initial message sounded like a feature request.
In any case, I'd suggest joining the list and starting a discussion
about profiling. There have been various threads in the past, and one
that produced some experimental code (see:
http://www.nabble.com/Octave-profiler%2C-tf3120434.html#a8645265
but this was not merged).
Regarding profiling and execution time I had a master student looking
into replacing the most common calls of complex matrix multiplication in
Matlab/Octave with C++ using MEX/OCT interfaces respectively in the PC
environment. The results were very discouraging, the execution times
built-in were faster for medium to large matrices in both Matlab and
Octave! The profiler in Matlab was used to find the lines of code with
the largest time was spent. My guess is that the replacement was on too
low level, at code-line level instead of function level creating a lot
of overhead eating up the gain of the compiled code.