I spent a few hours playing with the development release 3.7.0+ of GNU/Octave on Linux. This is not quite ready for production use, early beta, the GUI still has two annoying bugs, probably still half a year away from a stable release.
But it looks rather good: It supports a GUI that should look very familiar and comfy to Matlab users, a JIT just-in-time compiler to improve the performance of badly written code in some cases, and some multi-threading support for some computations.
While the JIT and multi-threading should be mostly irrelevant for use with ptb, given that ptb's performance is usually not restricted/affected very much by such things, this may be beneficial for computational applications.
I hope the GUI, once it is stable, will convince more users to give Octave a try on OSX and Linux. Currently at least 23% of all our Linux users (good!) and about 3% of OSX users use Octave instead of Matlab.
Ubuntu Linux users may appreciate this site:
<https://launchpad.net/~octave/+archive/stable>
It provides up to date packages of the latest stable versions of Octave for all Ubuntu releases back to 10.04 LTS, currently Octave 3.6.3, if you're not happy with what your distro ships as default.
On OSX, installing octave via Homebrew is the recommended method, although other package managers may work with some tweaks. On Windows we don't support Octave anymore, due to lack of sufficient interest.
Here is some status report from Octave's lead developers:
<http://planet.octave.org/octconf2012/status.pdf>
<http://planet.octave.org/octconf2012/what-is-octave.pdf>
Here are more slides from their last OctConf 2012 developer conference:
<http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/octconf-2012-report/>
-mario
But it looks rather good: It supports a GUI that should look very familiar and comfy to Matlab users, a JIT just-in-time compiler to improve the performance of badly written code in some cases, and some multi-threading support for some computations.
While the JIT and multi-threading should be mostly irrelevant for use with ptb, given that ptb's performance is usually not restricted/affected very much by such things, this may be beneficial for computational applications.
I hope the GUI, once it is stable, will convince more users to give Octave a try on OSX and Linux. Currently at least 23% of all our Linux users (good!) and about 3% of OSX users use Octave instead of Matlab.
Ubuntu Linux users may appreciate this site:
<https://launchpad.net/~octave/+archive/stable>
It provides up to date packages of the latest stable versions of Octave for all Ubuntu releases back to 10.04 LTS, currently Octave 3.6.3, if you're not happy with what your distro ships as default.
On OSX, installing octave via Homebrew is the recommended method, although other package managers may work with some tweaks. On Windows we don't support Octave anymore, due to lack of sufficient interest.
Here is some status report from Octave's lead developers:
<http://planet.octave.org/octconf2012/status.pdf>
<http://planet.octave.org/octconf2012/what-is-octave.pdf>
Here are more slides from their last OctConf 2012 developer conference:
<http://jordi.inversethought.com/blog/octconf-2012-report/>
-mario