[mNovak]

As an engineer, I use Matlab (or rather, Octave the free equivalent) all the time. It's really great for numerical computing and plotting. Most things 'just work', there's a sizeable collection of packages, and I personally like how flexible the function inputs are.

Biggest drawback though is that it's over-optimized for matrix math, that it forces you to think about everything as matrices, even if that's not how your data naturally lies. The first thing they teach about performant Matlab code is that simple for-loops will tank performance. And you feel it pretty quickly, I saw a case once of some image processing, with a 1000x speedup from Matlab-optimized syntax.

Other things issues I've run into are string handling (painful), and generally OOP is unnatural. Would love to see something with the convenient math syntax of Matlab, but with broader ease of use of something like JS.

[nallana]

@mNovak -- super helpful note! Thank you!

Author of RunMat (this project) here --

> The first thing they teach about performant Matlab code is that simple for-loops will tank performance.

Yes! Since in RunMat we're building a computation graph and fusing operations into GPU kernels, we built the foundations to extend this to loop fusion.

That should allow RunMat to take loops as written, and unwrap the matrix math in the computation graph into singular GPU programs -- effectively letting loop written math run super fast too.

Will share more on this soon as we finish loop fusion, but see `docs/fusion/INTERNAL_NOTE_FLOOPS_VM_OPS.md` in the repo if curious (we're also creating VM ops for math idioms where they're advantageous).

> Would love to see something with the convenient math syntax of Matlab, but with broader ease of use of something like JS.

What does "convenient math syntax of Matlab, but with broader ease of use of something like JS" look like to you? What do you wish you could do with Matlab but can't / it doesn't do well with?

[dkarl]

Piggybacking on this comment to say, I bet a lot of people's first question will be, why aren't you contributing to Octave instead of starting a new project? After reading this declaration of the RunMat vision, the first thing I did was ctrl-f Octave to make sure I hadn't missed it.

Honest question, Octave is an old project that never gained as much traction as Julia or NumPy, so I'm sure it has problems, and I wouldn't be surprised if you have excellent reasons for starting fresh. I'm just curious to hear what they are, and I suspect you'll save yourself some time fielding the same question over and over if you add a few sentences about it. I did find [1] on the site, and read it, but I'm still not clear on if you considered e.g. adding a JIT to Octave.

[1] https://runmat.org/blog/matlab-alternatives

[zackmorris]

Piggybacking also to say that I hope you succeed, as your work aligns closely with the type of runtime that I had hoped to write someday when I first used MATLAB in the early 2000s (now mostly GNU Octave for small hobby projects).

The loop fusion idea sounds amazing. Another point of friction which I ran into is that MATLAB uses 1-based offsets instead of 0-based offsets for matrices/arrays, which can make porting code examples from other languages tricky. I wish there was a way to specify the offset base with something like a C #define or compiler directive. Or a way to rewrite code in-place to use the other base, a bit like running Go's gofmt to format code. Apologies if something like this exists and I'm just too out of the loop.

I'd like to point out one last thing, which is that working at the fringe outside of corporate sponsorship causes good ideas to take 10 or 20 years to mature. We all suffer poor tooling because the people that win the internet lottery pull up the ladder behind them.

[Alexander-Barth]

I wish you all the best luck with your product!

Unfortunately, mathworks is a quite litigious company. I guess you are aware of mathworks versus AccelerEyes (now makers of ArrayFire) or Comsol.

For our department, we mostly stop to use MATLAB about 7 years ago, migrating to python, R or Julia. Julia fits the "executable math" quite well for me.

[queuebert]

> Biggest drawback though is that it's over-optimized for matrix math ...

I think this is what inspired the creation of Julia -- they wanted a Matlab clone where for loops were fast because some problems don't fit the matrix mindset.

[grandiego]

Yes, strings appear like an afterthought, and sadly the Octave version has slight incompatibilities which may be a PITA for any non trivial script which aims to be compatible.

[hatmatrix]

It's one of those languages that outgrew its original purpose, as did Python IMHO. So non-matrix operations like string processing and manipulation of data structures like tables (surprisingly, graphs are not bad) become unwieldy in MATLAB - much like Python's syntax becomes unwieldy in array calculations, as illustrated in the original post.