Re: Possible (summer of code) projects for Octave

[Søren Hauberg]

man, 03 01 2011 kl. 20:10 +0100, skrev Daniel Kraft:
> Of course, what came first to my mind 
> when thinking about this, was JIT or a byte-code VM approach to speed up 
> interpretation of loops and other stuff -- but from what I read on the 
> mailing list archives, this is already a somewhat "well known" project 
> and I understand that there are a lot of difficulties in particular 
> because of the dynamic typing.  Still, maybe there are currently some 
> ideas or motivation to try something into that direction?

When I talk to the compiler experts at university they tell me that it
is not an all-that-impossible task to implement something simple here.
Personally, I don't know the first thing in this field so I can't
comment much further except to say that few (if any at all) people on
this list are experts on JIT technology, so anybody working on this
would either need to be an expert or have a working relationship with an
expert.

> Otherwise, I 
> also read something about attempts to make use of multiple cores -- this 
> sounds interesting, too, are the ongoing projects towards (or interest 
> in) that?

Some functionality exists in various packages for this, but having
something easier to use could be quite nice. I've seen work (can't find
the reference right now; ask if you're interested and I'll do my best at
digging it out) for NumPy where several functions got extended for an
extra argument for controlling parallisation of the function. E.g. you
could do something like (syntax is off-the-top-of-my-head)

  b = solve (A, x, num_nodes=10)

which would then distribute the program to 10 nodes in a cluster. I
would find something similar to be quite nice in Octave.

> Some other things that would be useful for Octave and the 
> user community?

First things that come to mind:

* Improve the OpenGL graphics system.
* Implement support for object oriented programming using 'classdef'.

Søren