GNU Octave:
for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X.
(As of 2025 Jun 24, the latest version is 10.2.0, dated 2025 May 29.)
The Octave language is ‘quite similar’ to that of MATLAB.
Discussions are held primarily at
octave.discourse.group,
with an optional
mailing-list mode;
there are also the old
help-octave and
octave-maintainers e-mail lists.
See also
Guidelines for reporting a new bug.
See
Any short texts … (2025 Mar 17) for suggestions for
introductions to Octave.
Octave uses gnuplot,
fltk and qt as graphics backends
(or ‘toolkits’).
The command available_graphics_toolkits()
lists which backends are available, and the command
graphics_toolkit() can be used to
ask about or set the default backend.
Asking to set either gnuplot or fltk
will produce a message saying why it’s a bad idea
and recommending use of qt.
The value of the interpreter property
(none, tex or latex)
‘determines the manner in which special control sequences
in the text are rendered.’
(ref)
‘The current graphic toolkits
[actually interpreters] produce very similar
graphic displays,
but differ in their capability to display unusual text and in their
ability to print such text. In general, the "tex" interpreter
(default) is the best all-around performer for both on-screen display
and printing. However, for the reproduction of complicated text
formulas the "latex" interpreter is preferred.’
(ref)
Some of the linear-algebra libraries used by Octave are
compiled for 32-bit integers, but there is a Windows installer
(e.g., octave-7.2.0-w64-64-installer.exe)
with a version of Octave compiled with 64-bit integers,
allowing larger arrays (ref).
The following information is rather old.
Octave-Forge
is ‘a central location for the collaborative development
of packages for GNU Octave’. A Windows installer is
provided which includes all or most of the packages, including
a Windows package which provides
a COM interface and additional functionality under Windows,
including ActiveX support with actxserver.
There have been some moves toward absorbing Octave-Forge
into the GNU Octave Web site (cf.
blog post by Carnë Draug, 2012 Aug 2, and a mock-up
of the proposed
agora.octave.org).
GUI development is possible within Octave;
it works best with qt, to some extent
with fltk, and not at all with
gnuplot
(ref).
See Henry Gomersall’s
Squishing Matlab mex files into Octave
for how to use a precompiled .mex file with
Octave under Linux when you don't have the source code.
A hint but no complete solution is offered for MS Windows.
OpenModelica:
open-source, aims to be a complete reference implementation,
not necessarily as efficient and scalable as the commercial
implementations of Modelica.
Includes a nice graphical connection editor.
