GNU Octave

A high-level interpreted language for numerical computations.

Octave is a free numerical computing environment that is largely syntactically compatible with MATLAB. Most simple MATLAB scripts run in Octave with little or no modification. It provides built-in matrix operations, plotting (via gnuplot or the qt-based plotter), control-systems toolkits, optimisation, ODE solvers, and a large standard library covering signal processing, statistics, and image processing.

John W. Eaton started Octave in 1988 as a tool for a chemical- reactor design course. The GNU project formally adopted it in 1997. Releases have been steady, with major-version bumps roughly every two years and a focus on closing remaining MATLAB compatibility gaps that academic users commonly hit.

Octave is widely used in teaching (students avoid MATLAB licensing for coursework), in academic research that doesn't need the proprietary MATLAB toolboxes, and as a reference implementation for porting MATLAB code to a free environment. For numerical work in industry, Julia and NumPy/SciPy have captured more mindshare in recent years.

License: GPL-3.0-or-later

Category: Language

Website: https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install octave
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install octave
Arch:          sudo pacman -S octave
macOS:         brew install octave

Authors

John W. Eaton (creator)
GNU Octave maintainers

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