Roadmap to 3.8.N

[Daniel Carrera]

Dear all,

First of all, I want to say thank you for making Octave. You guys rock.

Summary:  I'm excited about the 3.8 release. Can anyone guess when 3.8 might come out?

Long story:

I have been using Octave for simple work for a number of years. I have now begun teaching the MATLAB portion of an astronomy course at my university (Lund University). The students can do the exercises in any programming language they want, but we *teach* MATLAB, so there is naturally a strong pull toward MATLAB. I am not the official in charge of the course, but I have been giving some thought to how we could replace MATLAB by a Free Software alternative. So you can imagine how excited I got when I realized that Octave 3.8 will have a GUI.

I saw the screenshots on octave-gsoc2012.blogspot.se and they look great. I think that the GUI will really make it a lot easier to recommend that we switch the course to Octave. That's why I'm interested in when 3.8 is coming out. In particular, I'm hoping that it may be available for the next school year. Next year I'm teaching the course (just this one time) so it is a good opportunity to try a switch. I did experiment with Octave, in the hopes we could use it this year, but the terminal on Windows is just terrible and ugly and I don't think I would get very far if I tried to push that.

On a slight tangent, Octave 3.8 will have a JIT compiler for loops. Does that mean that Octave and MATLAB will have about the same speed from that point on?

Cheers,

Daniel.

--
I'm not overweight, I'm undertall.