Re: For loop benchmarks between Octave versions

[Daniel J Sebald]

On 06/24/2014 02:06 AM, Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> On 06/24/2014 12:01 AM, Julien Bect wrote:
>
> > An interesting reference : http://speed.julialang.org/about ?
>
> There's even test results for Octave in the table here:
>
> http://julialang.org/
>
> Julia looks very similar to the familiar syntax we know for Octave with
> a few extra features for parallelism. However, I don't understand the
> Julia setup well enough to know how the comparison is done and how we
> can automate comparisons integrating Julia.

OK, looking at your perf.m, I get it now.  There are similar performance 
perf.X files in the Julia repository.  I don't see any license language 
there.

In theory, we could do something similar, i.e., just write our own 
little utility program in C that implements the tests done in Octave 
code.  Since we are always using a C compiler, we could make the 
building of this utility part of the Octave build process.  For example, 
say the C program (call it Cperf.c for now) generates as an output a 
string of characters that lists the test and the CPU consumption:

systemcommline> Cperf
doubleForLoop/1: 181.8
doubleForLoop/a=1: 294.7
doubleForLoop/a=b: 275.6
doubleForLoop/a=a+b: 335.8
doubleForLoop/a=sin(b*i): 383.4
vectorOfSquares: 677.7
mandel: 224.9
fib: 687.6
parse_int: 2392.1
quicksort: 1244.9
pi_sum: 18236.1
rand_mat_stat: 572.8
rand_mat_mul: 515.9
printfd: 1233.3

Then, the Octave test script that implement perf.m could call the system 
function Cperf to get the values and do the relative-to-C comparisons.

That seems like a pretty good comparison to me, and the benefit is we 
know that Cperf is built with pretty much the same environment as Matlab 
and is always present.

Dan