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Comment by gipp | Hacker News Reader

How does this compare to Octave? (https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/)

Scilab is one of the two major open-source alternatives to MATLAB, the other one being GNU Octave.[1][2][3][4] Scilab is similar enough to MATLAB that some book authors (who use it) argue that it is easy to transfer skills between the two systems.[5] Scilab however puts less emphasis on (bidirectional) syntactic compatibility with MATLAB than Octave does.[1][6][7]

I believe Scilab has a Simulink equivalent, whereas I do not think Octave does?

I'm a control engineer by training, and to be honest there's really no equivalent to Matlab/Simulink right now for control system design. Fortunately I'm currently working on statistics/sensor-fusion related stuff, and Python works just fine for that.

I tried doing sensor fusion with simulink and I thought it was horrible. Then me and my team switched to python instead and it worked really well. Never understood why to use simulink for other things then just controls.

Been playing around with it for the past hour or so, looks like the program is trying to replicate MATLAB/Simulink with Scilab/Xcos. The menus/UI and other features very closely parallel MATLAB. Can even convert MATLAB code to Scilab code. Looks like it's being positioned as a cheaper alternative for a lot of educational establishments in developing countries.

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