Well, there's Octave and R. They're not drop-in compatible, but they have similar functionality.
As usual, it's not the particular functionality of the platform that's important, but the surrounding ecosystem of tools and packages, that keeps people using MATLAB rather than the alternatives-- in my opinion, at least.
Posted Nov 2, 2012 8:26 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341)
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Octave is at least pretty close to MatLab. Close enough that simpler MatLab codes often work in Octave with minimal, even no, changes. R has a completely different programming model (slightly odd), so I assume it's completely incompatible.
OT: No free alternative to Simulink and MATLAB
Posted Nov 8, 2012 14:46 UTC (Thu) by njs (guest, #40338)
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Python is also a strong matlab alternative these days via the numpy/scipy ecosystem... but none of these tools will generate real-time capable C code for you from a high-level description. That's the key feature they need.
Really the closest competitor here would be something like Eigen.