Its been a while since I worked with MATLAB and others. Whats up with GNU Octave these days? IIRC thats what folks were championing 10 years ago when anyone was talking about the problems with MATLAB.

I sometimes run my MATLAB code under Octave (generally needs some minor tweaks to catch up with a few new features) and while I don't hit bugs, I find it is much slower.

I think the MATLAB JIT compiler is probably difficult to match.