Comment by moregrist

The last time I seriously used Matlab, over 10 years ago, they had implemented JIT compilation and often straightforward loops were a lot faster than trying to vectorize. And definitely less error-prone.

Iirc, ‘\’ was just shorthand for solving a system of equations, which you could mentally translate into the appropriate LAPACK function without loss of precision. You did have to be a little more careful about making extra copies than in Fortran or C (or even Python). But nothing was magic.