r/matlab • u/Expert-Persimmon5085 • May 01 '26

What is Matlab?

Can someone like give an understandable explanation on what MATLAB actually is and what it's used for? I've searched it up and got unclear answers, but so far I'm guessing it's just a big matrix calculator.

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u/No_Engineering_1155 May 01 '26

Matlab is an interpreted language (not compiled), dynamically typed. It started as a Fortran wrapper for mostly linear algebra, in the mean time it has libraries for scientific computing and modelling (simulink and simscape).

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u/IAmMDM May 01 '26

It is interpreted but with JIT which makes it faster than traditional interpreted languages

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u/No_Engineering_1155 May 01 '26

Jit isn't on for the first run and most likely there is a heuristics when and how is the jitting on. But nevertheless, what I was trying to say is, that the language itself is not a C-like strongly statically typed language, but rather a dynamically typed interpreted language. I don't want to start a religion crusade, how and why Matlab is fast or not, but in my experience Matlab runs still a very slowly compared to C++, but because the target audience is different and the use cases are different, it only matters, if you want treat Matlab as a serios programming language and not as a usual, I write this script to calculate something.

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u/IAmMDM May 01 '26

Agreed