> My guess is that REBOL is a (nearly) pure interpreter, so no "compiling" to
> byte-code or equivalent is involved.
Would it be even possible to even partially compile rebol? I know there was
Joe's Marshall Sherman, but it was for REBOL 1.x family ...
> LOOP is the fastest method, closely followed by REPEAT, WHILE is the next
> fastest, and FOR is very slow. The reason FOR is so slow is that unlike the
> others which are NATIVE's, FOR is a function written in REBOL.
What's the reason against having such function implemented natively? Any problem
in wrapping the functionality needed into C code?
> I think RT should either increase the accuracy of NOW or create a timer
> function, in either case returning a result with millisecond precision (the
> least significant digits may be inaccurate or set to zero on some systems).
agreed ...
> In December 99, I ran a lot of timings for linear algebra operations in
> REBOL, for instance matrix multiplication, matrix inversion, LU
> decomposition, etc. on 100x100 randomly generated matrices. The bottom line
> was that REBOL was about 80-300 times slower than MATLAB which uses highly
> optimised C-code for the same operations.
Uh oh, hmm, so much? Matlab is interpreted too, no? But well, MathWorks has
great know-how and I believe matrix operations run natively.
I requested matrix operations being added to rebol, but got no reply. I think
they are "basic advanced" math stuff :-) Well, at least my friend havily using
Matlab told me that having such functionality natively implemented in REBOL,
would open us the whole field for "fast" image effect creations ... And at later
stage, such stuff could be moved into separate /Math module(s).
-pekr-
> This is a more realistic
> comparison for numerics intensive work. These REBOL times are comparable
> with those achieved in other interpreted languages, indeed much better than
> some.
>
> -Larry
>
> > Rodney
