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The Scilab Consortium recently launched Scilab 5.2. Scilab is a numerical computing platform available for free under the CeCILL license. This release brings many features and enhancements making it even more powerful than ever before. The full list of change is available from the scilab website as well as the release notes.

I have been using Scilab for many years now, starting somewhere around version 3 and like most open source software, things have come a very long way from there. The same way, my interest and involvement have grown from a newbie user to eventually participating to the GSOC 2009 as a mentor for Scilab/Digiteo last summer. Consequently, I am very pleased to see my favourite mathematical computing software growing by a revision.

And it also pleases me to say that this will be the first release of Scilab available in the Blastwave.org collection of software package. It will be distributed both for the x86 and Sparc architecture running Solaris 10 or OpenSolaris. Installation instructions, release notes and other informations specific to the Blastwave distribution are available on the Blastwave wiki.

Fun with fractals using Scilab 5.2. (Click for full resolution.)

Scilab 5.2 features a brand new distribution of the Scicos dynamic simulator named Xcos. Like it's predecessor it is a powerful mixed-mode simulator with implicit solving capabilities and an even richer set of components. However, the prime new feature of Xcos is it's new editor powered by JGraphX[LINK]. Using this new framework Xcos now has a modern look and feel and is more stable then ever before(At least under Solaris). As an added bonus, users of Xcos also get bigger diagram support, undo/redo and copy/paste!

One of the bundled demo of Xcos. (Click for full resolution.)

That is not all. Scilab 5.2 also boast a new integrated editor named, you guessed it, Xpad. This new editor brings better integration with the fifth generation of Scilab along with all the niceness we are used to nearly 10 years from the millennium.

Action shot of Xpad. (Click for full resolution.)

Of course, Scilab 5.2 contains many many bugfixes that increase it's stability and functionality. Toolbox developers will also be pleased to have access to a better and more concise API than before as well as a major source reorganization making extension writing much less painful. Moreover, UNIX/Linux users have easier access to a command line version of Scilab with working system pipe. All in all, many new features for the professionals and amateur alike to play with.

There are more features and improvements that I would like to talk about but I will keep those for future posts. Stay tuned as it should hit the unstable tree at Blastwave.org pretty soon.