Re: Question

[c.]

On 7 Jul 2016, at 10:27, Dominic O'Kane <address@hidden> wrote:

> Hi All
> I have a very basic question I would like to ask. Forgive me if it appears 
> dumb.
> I like Octave and the idea of contributing to this community but the speed of 
> computation is an issue for me and keeps pushing me back to matlab and 
> alternatives.
> I realise that it is a lot of work to be done to get a fast JIT compiler.
> I was wondering if it might be easier to have a built in parser that can 
> convert octave code to C which can then be compiled to machine code by the 
> local compiler to produce fast object files and an executable that would run 
> at close to the maximum possible speed. The compilation may take a short time 
> - say a minute or so.
> The work flow for users would be to do all initial development and debugging 
> and testing in octave but click on a "compile" button when they are ready in 
> order to obtain the fast executable. 
> I appreciate that this would require some clever makefile to be generated. 
> And every user would need to have a c compiler on their machine.
> But compared to writing a full working JIT, would this be easier ?
> Regards
> D

I think this has been attempted several times.
If you search the mailing list archives you should 
find a relatively recent thread where someone was
announcing work on a similar project.

c.