FreeMat is, as its name suggests, a free and open source clone of the commercial product – MATLAB. It’s a numerical computing environment for scientific processing and rapid engineering, it supports Fast Fourier Transform, 2D/3D graphics plotting and visualization, and parallel processing.
FreeMat has the most features of MATLAB – in terms of numerical computing field, and has a similar user interface to MATLAB. FreeMat is cross-platform, it works on Windows 7, Windows XP / Vista / 2000 / NT / 9X / Me, as well as Mac OS X and Linux.
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Feature List
- Codeless interface to external C/C++/FORTRAN code.
- Full support for dynamic structure arrays.
- Supports function pointers (eval and feval are fully supported).
- Supports classes, operator overloading.
- N-dimensional array manipulation (by default, N is limited to 6)
- Support for 8 / 16 / 32 / 64 bit integer types (signed and unsigned), 32 and 64 bit floating point types, and 64 and 128 bit complex types.
- Built in arithmetic for manipulation of all supported data types.
- Support for solving linear systems of equations via the divide operators.
- Eigenvalue and singular value decompositions.
- Full control structure support (including, for, while, break, continue, etc.).
- 2D plotting and image display.
- 3D Plotting and visualization via OpenGL.
- Heterogeneous array types (called “cell arrays” in MATLAB-speak) fully supported.
- Arbitrary-size FFT support.
- Pass-by-reference support (an IDL feature).
- Keyword support (an IDL feature).
- Native Windows / Mac OS X support.
- Native sparse matrix support.
- Parallel processing with MPI (in the FreeMat development versions).
- Handle-based graphics.
Download FreeMat for Windows from CNET.
Download FreeMat for Mac OS X / Linux from SourceForge.