Has development of Freemat ceased?

[Mark Knecht]

I only found Freemat a couple of days ago so I'm very new to it. I'm quite impressed with it's capabilities (and it's GREAT documentation) but that said I'm running into multiple bugs and I don't see any releases in nearly 18 months. Has the development team moved on or it the newer stuff somewhere else?

Problems I'm seeing right now:

Windows version:
- Opening Help causes a complete crash - This problem appears to have been around unfixed for well over a year.


Linux version: (Gentoo Linux, version 4.2)
- Basic plot() function call fails completely:

--> x = linspace(-pi,pi);

--> y = cos(x);

--> plot(x,y,'r-');

In /usr/share/FreeMat-4.2/toolbox/graph/private/parseit.m(/usr/share/FreeMat-4.2/toolbox/graph/private:parseit) at line 5

    In /usr/share/FreeMat-4.2/toolbox/graph/private/islinespec.m(/usr/share/FreeMat-4.2/toolbox/graph/private:islinespec) at line 21

    In /usr/share/FreeMat-4.2/toolbox/graph/plot.m(plot) at line 38

    In docli(builtin) at line 1

    In base(base)

    In base()

    In global()

Error: Illegal range in get

--> 

- plot3d - Freemat creates the plot but the rotational controls only move the window, they don't rotate the graphics.

Anyway, if developers have moved on and are busy elsewhere then that would be a bit sad but I understand how Open Source development goes sometimes. If there's still interest in developers and you need Linux testers then I hope you'll get in touch.

Cheers,

Mark

[Timothy Cyders]

Mark,

Samit has made some changes here and there, but it's been about a year and a half since then. To be honest, the few of us (Samit, Demetrios, Eugene, Chuong, Gary, myself and others) who were active in development a few years ago have been kind of swept away with work. I try to respond to help requests on here when I can, and Jonathan and some others have done a good job of contributing in that way as well. I'd love to see things pick up again on the software development side, but I'm buried in work to an extent that I can't be the catalyst that makes that happen. I expect the same is true of the other guys as well. I'm copying freemat-devel on this as well. Wish I had a rosier response, but it is what it is.

Cheers,

TJ

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[Samit Basu]

Hi Mark,

As Timothy said, it can sometimes be difficult to keep a project moving - especially when it's a purely passion-driven project.  I'm surprised that your Gentoo build fails.  I have a bunch of people using 4.2 regularly on Ubuntu and Fedora with no problems.

In any case, active development on the 4 branch has ended.  It is simply too difficult to build and maintain - especially the windows build.  There is active work on the 5.0 branch.  It has some great features, including support for new-style classes, better threading support, and is much, much faster than 4.x (routinely 10 to 20 times faster).  It is also significantly easier to build.  When we have something that's worthy of it, we'll be sure to put out a call for help with testing.

Samit

[Mark Knecht]

Samit & TJ,

   Thanks for the responses. I would have replied back sooner but somehow didn't get subscribed to my own question. Oh well...

   Anyway, it's good to have a little visibility into what's going on with FreeMat. We got the Gentoo portage system updated to handle 4.2 and it seems to work fine, at least as much as a new user can test it. I've done a few simple things, but mostly just executing code from the examples in the documentation. So far as I can tell the few problems I had with 4.0 & 4.1 are fixed.

   Note that there really isn't much use of FreeMat going on in the Gentoo world, as best I can tell. 4.2 has been available for over a year but no one updated the ebuilds until I asked. Too bad as there's truly a lot of great stuff in this program.

   Being that my needs are fairly immediate I actually purchased a home copy of MatLab a couple of days ago, along with the DSP and Signal Processing add-ons. I found FreeMat based on Jonathan Weaver's posts but decided there's enough educational value in the MatLab offerings to warrant the purchase. Anyway, now that I have both if there are things I might do in terms of testing/comparison I'm happy to help out when time is available.

   I certainly hope you guys will continue on with your development work. This is a really professional piece of work with great documentation. It would be a shame to have it wither away. I hope I'll be able to make some small contribution. I'm not a programmer but have used Linux since about 1998 and it's been my primary desktop (Gentoo/KDE) since about 2006 so I'm relatively familiar with how these things go.

   Again, many thanks!

Cheers,

Mark