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Comment by ErsatzVerkehr | Hacker News Reader

As someone who loves Matlab but would rather use a free-software solution, I must say that Octave is not an effective replacement for Matlab. Matlab itself is just so much more feature-complete and polished, turning to Octave feels like going back two decades in technology.

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We're actually pretty feature complete wrt Matlab. The biggest things that are missing are the GUI, classdef OOP, and a JIT compiler. All of these currently have very lively and active development. Hopefully our next Octave release will seem less archaic to you.

The language itself is very feature complete, however. Our main current goal has been for you to be able to grab your Matlab code and run it without modification in GNU Octave. For 99.9% of the lines of code in your code (assuming you don't use classdef), this works. The problem is that you might not always want to modify the remaining 0.1% lines of code to make them run in GNU Octave.

In what way is Matlab more feature-complete and polished? With respect to just the actual language Octave is nearly a 1:1 implementation of Matlab, which is an primary goal to stride for and maintain, any differences between the two is considered a bug even.

Graphics in general, handle graphics in particular, and no I'm not kidding. OOP for visualization can't be beat.

So a specific graphics toolkit then? Is it one that is included with Matlab or another toolkit that is necessary to pay in addition for?

Matlab is usually run as an ide with an interactive window (command line interpreter). Graphics are built in and interactive, you can interact with any number of graphics windows and with the command line at the same time (this is difficult to do in python numpy and matplotlib), and you can tweak the graphics windows from the command line to add GUI buttons, boxes, etc. This all comes built in to the most basic MATLAB commercial offering.

Ah, you meant the GUI, not specifically the handle graphics properies, and a GUI to manipulate the graphics.

This is all in development and almost completely functional in the current Octave dev branch. I hope our next upcoming release will satisfy you more.

Octave has handle graphics and almost all of the handle graphics properties that Matlab has. Do help us record which particular bits of handle graphics you're missing. It helps us to have a list of what's missing.

Matlab is much faster. For a sense of scale, a relatively simple image processing script ran 125 times faster in Matlab than Octave. This is, most likely, because Matlab has a better code optimizer.

I don't see a compelling reason to use Octave unless you're trying to avoid paying for a Matlab license. If you're going to switch tools, why not switch to NumPy/SciPy and get the advantage of using a full-featured programming language?

The "code optimiser" you're talking about is "just" a JIT compiler. Loops in Octave are slow. They were slow in Matlab too, but then they got a JIT compiler.

We're currently working on a getting a JIT compiler into Octave too. Here are two GSoC blogs about it:

    http://octave-jitc.blogspot.ca/
    http://jit-octave.blogspot.ca/

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