> The biggest issue with Octave for me is the slowness of its plotting compared to MATLAB
I was going to say exactly the same thing. The language implementation is mostly fine-ish. But plotting (which is like half the point of MATLAB) is unusable slow.
It's not just Octave though. All of Julia's plotting libraries are similarly slow. MATLAB still has a monopoly on fast scientific plotting.
Matlab's hobby license is sufficiently cheap that I really would recommend getting that unless you absolutely can't afford it.
This (individual non-commercial license) is my current approach, too. I wonder though, why do we have such a lack of fast scientific plotting, as you wrote?
Is it due to the fact that few people really care or is there some inherent set of hard problems that Mathworks figured out how to handle?
I have no idea to be honest. I don't think there is much that is really hard about it. It's probably a ton of work because to be really useful you have to support a ton of options (like rotated labels, log axes, dashed lines, stepped lines, gaps in lines, etc. etc.). It's a nearly endless list and I guess to do that and to make it not slow is just loooads of work.
I was going to say exactly the same thing. The language implementation is mostly fine-ish. But plotting (which is like half the point of MATLAB) is unusable slow.
It's not just Octave though. All of Julia's plotting libraries are similarly slow. MATLAB still has a monopoly on fast scientific plotting.
Matlab's hobby license is sufficiently cheap that I really would recommend getting that unless you absolutely can't afford it.