Octave optimizations (use liboil?)

[John Swensen]

I was recently looking at liboil to do some fast casting and copying and began 
to wonder whether Octave could benefit from something like this.  I know that 
many of the computations of Octave are optimized if compiled against optimized 
BLAS/LAPACK implementations (e.g. Atlas), but what other parts of Octave are 
already optimized and what parts are not.  I assume that when I round floating 
point values and then use them as indices into an image, there is a cast going 
on somewhere there.  Also, anytime I do an explicit typecast it might benefit.  
The nice thing about liboil is that it is optimized for a set of CPUs that 
represent the majority of users.

Is there a benefit to incorporating something like this into Octave?

John Swensen