The MATLAB® programming environment is often perceived as a platform suitable for prototyping and modeling but not for actual real-life applications. One of the reasons that I constantly hear when consulting with clients is that “MATLAB is slow”.
This book aims to help reduce this perception and shows that MATLAB programs can in fact be made to run extremely fast, in a wide variety of different ways.
MathWorks, who develop MATLAB, invests a significant amount of R&D effort in constantly improving MATLAB’s performance and advocating best practices for improved performance.1 Postings for performance-related R&D jobs are periodically posted2 and the engine’s performance improves with almost every semi-annual MATLAB release. In fact, the same MATLAB programs that might have been slow 10 or more years ago may now be blazingly fast when run using the latest MATLAB release, on the very same platform.
Using programming techniques presented in this book, MATLAB applications can be made even faster, fast enough for most uses. This enables significant reduction of the development time and cost, since we can use MATLAB from end to end, from prototyping to deployment, without having to maintain a mirror code–base using a different programming language and environment.
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