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 major release will be GNU Octave 7.1. The release procedure has not yet started. Use 6.1 Release Checklist as template for organization.
• Older releases
• "Nightly" Octave releases on https://octave.space

Goals for upcoming releases

As discussed in the Online Developer Meeting (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/priorities.

jwe priorities

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

• 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.
• Refactor/rewrite code for handling load path.
• Refactor/rewrite exist and which functions.
• 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.
• Accept Matlab's new argument validation syntax in parser.

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