Scilab is a scientific software package for numerical computations providing a powerful open computing environment for engineering and scientific applications. Developed since 1990 by researchers from INRIA and ENPC, it is now maintained and developed by Scilab Consortium since its creation in May 2003.

Although it is distributed at no cost and described as “open source”, Scilab is not “open-source” according to the commonly accepted definition of the Open Source Initiative, because the Scilab license prohibits commercial redistribution of modified versions.

Scilab includes hundreds of mathematical functions with the possibility to add interactively programs from various languages (C, Fortran…). It has sophisticated data structures (including lists, polynomials, rational functions, linear systems…), an interpreter and a high level programming language.

Scilab has been designed to be an open system where the user can define new data types and operations on these data types by using overloading.

A number of toolboxes are available with the system: Scilab screenshot

• 2-D and 3-D graphics, animation
• Linear algebra, sparse matrices
• Polynomials and rational functions
• Simulation: ODE solver and DAE solver
• Scicos: a hybrid dynamic systems modeler and simulator
• Classic and robust control, LMI optimization
• Differentiable and non-differentiable optimization
• Signal processing
• Metanet: graphs and networks
• Parallel Scilab using PVM
• Statistics
• Interface with Computer Algebra: Maple package for Scilab code generation, MuPAD 3.0 includes Scilab
• Interface with Tcl/Tk
• And a large number of contributions for various domains.

Scilab has been built using a number of external libraries.

Scilab works on most Unix systems (including GNU/Linux) and Windows (9X/2000/XP).