True, but if performance is your key concern, you shouldn't use either of them. Octave and MATLAB are great for prototyping matrix based numerical algorithms. A

True, but if performance is your key concern, you shouldn't use either of them. Octave and MATLAB are great for prototyping matrix based numerical algorithms. And for this purpose I find Octave much more pleasant, since it is less nitpicky regarding its syntax. And once I have something that works and want to apply it to huge datasets, I usually rewrite my code in C++.