Re: [ANN] GSL Shell 2.1 released

[Benjamin von Ardenne <benjamin.von.ardenne@...>]

On Sat, Feb 11, 2012 at 9:38 PM, Francesco Abbate <francesco.bbt@gmail.com> wrote:

2012/2/11 Gaspard Bucher <gaspard@teti.ch>:

> Out of curiosity, how does GSL Shell compare with GNU Octave [1] ?

Hi Gaspard,

to be honest I'm not well placed to talk about that because I don't
really know Octave. But I can say for sure a few things:
- Octave is compatible with Matlab, this is not the case of GSL Shell
- GSL Shell is based on the Lua programming language with LuaJIT2,
Octave I don't know
- Octave use gnuplot to create plots while GSL Shell has its own plotting system
- Octave use extensively LAPACK AFAIK, GSL Shell use only the GSL
library (this may change in future)
- Octave is a mature well established software, GSL Shell is a young project
- GSL Shell features integration algorithms that can perform closely
to C optimized code. Octave I don't know.

May be other people that better know Octave can complete the picture.

Francesco

I use GSL-Shell as a MATLAB/Octave alternative and I have to say that for normal prototypes, you will find almost all funcitonality in GSL-Shell with the benefit of the enormous speed increase and the nice additional language features of lua. One might miss some features in the plotting system. But since octave is using gnuplot - a tool that has evolved over more than 10 years - this is understandable. Still I like the quality of the gsl-shell plots much more, thanks to Francescos very good work on that. Also more features will come and that will close that gap as well.

In comparison to octave with the limited number of packages, you can use every available Lua library in the shell of the box which makes it a more versatile system.

So for me, in comparison, gsl-shell is more powerful in most ways and only lacks some specialized numeric libraries. But maybe this will also change in the future.

Benjamin