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
  • Commit message guidelines

🔬 Octave development

Attend our next Online Developer Meeting 🙂💬 (See all previous meetings)

🛠️ 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 minor release will be GNU Octave 8.3.0 (a few months major release).
• The next major release will be GNU Octave 9.1.0 (beginning of 2024).
• Release History
• Old release checklists
• "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.

Large New Features

• Compatible arguments block (some work has been done; need to execute actions when functions are called)
• Compatible local functions
• Compatible string class
  • Define class itself ([initial implementation?)
  • Construct strings objects from double quoted strings (painful transition).
• Compatible table class (initial implementation?)
• 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
• Make import feature work

Internal Improvements

• Refactor/rewrite code for handling load path
• Refactor/rewrite exist and which functions
• Refactor function objects
• Refactor broadcasting and make it work for sparse matrices
• Replace the terminal widget in the GUI
• Write stack-based byte-code interpreter that doesn't result in deeply nested function calls to evaluate code
• JIT compiler
• Move more code inside octave namespace
• Eliminate mutable class data where possible
• Eliminate singleton objects
• Use classdef for handle graphics?

Other

• 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

💡 Project ideas and work in progress

• Short projects -- Good starting point to get into the Octave development.
• Summer of Code - Getting Started -- 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.

Other

• Project Infrastructure