New benchmark framework (was: Octave equivalent to Matlab's 'timeit' function)

[ederag]

On Saturday, March 17, 2018 18:05:03 Patel, Ankush wrote:
> I already looked through the octave-forge packages, but I was curious
> whether there was an Octave equivalent to Matlab's timeit() function here
> <https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/timeit.html>? I'm trying to test
> the efficiency of my code. If there isn't a function, I could work on
> implementing one.


bench_timeit() can be useful for this purpose;
it performs an adaptive increase of the number of repetitions,
and a warmup step,
to get meaningful results.

The example results are obtained with neither cpu isolation nor
performance governor, so there is room for even higher reproducibility.

This function is part of an updated version
https://sourceforge.net/p/octave-benchmark2/code/
of the old benchmark package.

The framework has been completely changed;
now it is possible to automatically adapt 
the number of repetitions of an individual benchmark.

This is a stub,
but already usable.

Octave-forge maintainers, 
please consider this as a review request.

Ederag