Gabor Szabo wrote: > ... > > Certainly price is a big difference and the > fact that PDL is open source while Matlab is > proprietary so I am more interested in the > technical aspects.
I use PDL and Matlab at work. At home I can only afford to run PDL. > I searched a bit and found this article: > http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/cool_fractals_with_perl_pdl_a_benchmark > which on the last page shows that PDL is twice as > fast as Matlab - at least in that specific > Mandelbrot example. Benchmarks are a tricky business. While PDL came out well here, a different problem measured might result in a different outcome. The key point here is that programming at a higher level of abstraction can give performance and ease of coding. For many problems, the software development and algorithm development and coding times far outweigh the runtime. > I found a few hits mentioning PDL::Matlab but > no actual code. Right. This is planned to be a set of routines to allow more matlab like syntax and functions for PDL. This would make it easier for Matlab users to start with PDL and easier for PDL users to go back and forth between PDL and Matlab---as I often do. No code yet. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perl_Data_Language > says "[PDL is ] intended for small to > medium sized analysis tasks" Pretty vague there since one person's small analysis task could be another person's huge task. > I could not find other references. > > So I am really interested you people pointing > me to further references or giving your opinion. An advantage that Matlab has is lots of pre-rolled algorithms that users can work with right away, without even knowing what or how they work. Because PDL is Perl based, it makes it easy to add additional functionality from external libraries. The threading capabilities of PDL also make it possible to implement processing across multiple dimensions easily with good performance. The catch is that extending PDL is more than "beginner's work". To that end, we've been working to improve the portability and robustness of PDL as a distribution to allow more folks (not just research scientists or Perl programmers) to just start out immediately with PDL. The current PDL-2.4.4 is the most portable PDL ever. It builds on win32, darwin, liunx, solaris, *bsd,... > > Lastly let me give my own plug: > One aspect that I guess users of Matlab will > say that PDL is lacking is the IDE. If I > understand correctly Matlab is an IDE with > a language. PDL is just the language. This > might not be an issue for people already > knowing PDL but I guess it might be harder to > "sell" PDL because of this. > > So I was wondering if it would help to hook > PDL up to Padre, the Perl IDE I have been > developing for some time with a bunch of > other people See http://padre.perlide.org/ . An enhanced PDL interactive interface is definitely something we're working towards. At the least, I would like to see various forms of TAB completion, integrated docs, and other convenience features so PDL can be run "out of the box" by anyone. If debugging, development, and cross platform portability are also supported, that would be fantastic! The current interactive interface is via the perldl shell which comes with PDL. It should be easy to develop a module (PDL::GUI::Padre) that would allow this capability in your IDE. > If anyone is interested in this I'd be glad > to discuss it here or on the Padre mailing > list or IRC channel. This would be the best forum for PDL folks. Regards, Chris > regards > Gabor > http://szabgab.com/ _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
