Category:Development

This page contains links to pages of interest to Octave developers.

Getting started

• Developer FAQ -- Start here.
• Contribution guidelines for Octave
  • C++ style guide
  • Octave style guide
  • Help text style guide

Octave development

Building

• Building -- General information how to build Octave from source.
  • Building on Microsoft Windows
  • Building on Ubuntu Virtual Machine
• Continuous Build -- Check changes with Buildbot.
• MXE -- Cross-compiling to MS Windows.
• Large array support --

Tools

• Mercurial -- How to use Octave's version control scheme, creating patches (changesets).
• Doxygen -- Documentation for C++ files
• ccache -- How to faster compile Octave.
• Editors -- A list of editors supporting Octave syntax highlighting.

Testing

• Tests
• BIST for m-files
• BIST for C++ files

Debugging

• Debugging Octave -- How to use gdb to obtain stack traces.
• Finding Memory Leaks -- How to use valgrind.

Releasing

• The next release will be GNU Octave 6.1. See the 6.1 Release Checklist for more information.
• Older releases

Goals for upcoming releases

As discussed in the developer meeting on 2020/10/27, this wiki section is for a list of possible goals for the next release. Although anyone may edit the wiki, this section is intended for active developers, not a place to dump wishlist items or feature requests. Please create a subsection for your ideas/prioirities.

jwe priorities

• Bug fixes, especially those related to compatibility issues.
• Work through the open bug reports for which patches have been submitted. Review/apply/reject and close as many of these reports as possible.
• Create a low-level interface to HDF5 functions.
• Support Matlab's HDF5-based MAT file format using the proposed low-level interface to HDF5 functions.
  • Allow all types of function handles to be saved and loaded.
  • Allow classdef objects to be saved and loaded.
• Replace the terminal widget in the GUI. See GUI terminal widget for more details and ideas for this project.

See also JWE Project Ideas for additional info about some of these items.

Project ideas and work in progess

• Short projects -- Good starting point to get into the Octave development.
• Summer of Code Project Ideas -- Ideas page for GSoC, SOCIS, ... projects.
• Projects -- Many things that would be nice to have done.
  • Classdef -- Define own data types using classdef.
  • JIT -- Just in time compiler for Octave.
  • GUI terminal widget -- Ideas about a new improved terminal widget.
  • International Characters Support -- Using Octave in your own language.
  • Pythonic -- Calling Python functions directly from Octave.

Meetings

• Read about past developer meetings.

Other

• Project Infrastructure