MATLAB: GNU Octave vs. Matlab

octaveopen sourceprogramming

Discovered a programing tool called Octave a few weeks ago. The language is almost identical to basic Matlab. The discriminating difference is that Octave is open source and free. For my robotics modeling applications, its more than adequate. I will likely stop spending money on Matlab, especially if the Octave organization develops a basic Simulink-like capability. Here's an interesting thread in the Octave website:
http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/Simulink-for-Octave-td3746480.html

Best Answer

Fine, Xavion. I like Octave also very much. The availability of the source code is a big advantage, because I can search for bugs for my own and adjust features for experiments. E.g. I cannot get MATLAB to allocate the memory for arrays with an 128-bit alignment, but in Octave I can control this -
- when I spend hours and days and weeks of programming, debugging and testing. And as long as I want to work with a running system, I decide to spend money for Matlab for the serious work.
Related Question