Mike Croucher writes about scientific computing, covering MATLAB, Julia, Octave and Jupyter notebooks, drawing on his work at the University of Manchester.
HN commenters recommend it as a researcher's blog with interesting technical content and link it for benchmarks and discussion of MATLAB and Julia.
Source downloads:
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/octave/
Windows binaries, with source code:
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/octave/windows/
Earlier screenshot of the GUI, but very similar to the current version:
http://www.walkingrandomly.com/images/octave/octave_GUI_38.png
The Windows binaries are partially due to commercial sponsorship. We are still selling more commercial support, and we are working on providing even more commercial options:
http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/commercial-support.html
Sorry, no Mac OS X binaries at this point. It has proven to be a much more difficult target than Windows, due to the impossibility of cross-compiling into it, plus several idiosyncracies in Apple's libraries. If you are comfortable with a CLI tool, Octave 4.0 is already in homebrew, which seems like the best option at the moment. If I could dedicate myself to this problem, I am confident I could put quite a dent into it.
If you are an Octave enthusiast, come to OctConf 2015 in Germany this September!
http://wiki.octave.org/OctConf_2015
One thing that is holding me back from porting my Matlab code to Julia is manual loop-unrolling. "It seems that, when using Julia, one needs to unlearn everything you’ve ever learned about vectorisation in MATLAB." [1]. Once the speed with Matlab-like syntax improves, I'll try again.
[1]: http://www.walkingrandomly.com/?cat=59
As a researcher (who codes contingently) I've enjoyed for a long time the blog of Mike Croucher (http://www.walkingrandomly.com/) who was Head of Scientific Applications Software Support at The University of Manchester and blogs accordingly, with interesting tips and insights on this issue. Very very recommended!
It will continue to be available, but I'm not sure what the performance increase is. There'll be a blog post on walkingrandomly.com coming in a few days - a guy who benchmarked it when it first came out. See http://www.walkingrandomly.com/?p=5220
hmm...this idea seems to have been brought up in a comment as well http://www.walkingrandomly.com/?p=2755#comment-31646
this looks like it-
http://www.walkingrandomly.com/?p=6187