PDL is pretty slow, also, compared to other available software for doing what it doesn't provide the speed, ease of use of other pieces of software.

I've been a PDL developer for a few years now and am the current release manager. This is the first time I've heard any reports that "PDL is pretty slow". I would appreciate references and benchmarks for this.

Also, a weird thing is that PDL depends on OpenGL, so on a machine without X you can't actually do anything with PDL (or you can but it takes you some additional $amount_of_time). That is not normal since machines that only crunch numbers needn't have X on them.

OpenGL is not X and X is not OpenGL. We're moving the baseline graphics capability to one based on OpenGL because it is the best common denominator for 2D and 3D display across all the major perl platforms.

Also, how portable is PDL actually? Haven't tried it on windows.

See the CPAN Testers matrix for the PDL-2.4.7 stable release at http://matrix.cpantesters.org/?dist=PDL+2.4.7. For current and accurate information on PDL, I refer you to our web site at http://pdl.perl.org