RunMat – a V8 inspired Rust runtime for the landlocked Matlab language
Why build this? MATLAB wasn’t chosen by engineers; it was inherited from classrooms. That unfair advantage let MathWorks sell a decades-old runtime with heavy startup, sluggish hot loops, and paywalled toolboxes. It milks about $500M a year out of the engineering ecosystem for what amounts to an outdated compiler and runtime stack. GNU Octave has been the main open-source way to run MATLAB code but it only supports a subset of the grammar and semantics, and its performance is far behind modern expectations. It’s more of a compatibility bridge than a true runtime alternative. I decided to…
RunMat – a V8 inspired Rust runtime for the landlocked Matlab language launched on August 21, 2025 with 15 votes, #814 of 8,530 launches that month and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
RunMat is an open-source Rust-based runtime for executing MATLAB code, designed as a modern alternative to MathWorks' proprietary compiler. It implements the full MATLAB language from scratch using a V8-inspired architecture that combines lightweight interpretation with JIT compilation via Cranelift for hot code paths. The tool targets engineers and researchers who use MATLAB but seek faster startup times, better performance on loops, and freedom from proprietary licensing. RunMat achieves approximately 5-millisecond cold start through snapshotting technology.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
A fast, open-source runtime for MATLAB code. Slim core written in Rust, V8-inspired execution, generational GC, and a package-first standard library.
This article was originally published in August 2025, when RunMat launched as an open-source command-line runtime for MATLAB-syntax code. That first release included 87 built-in functions, a basic set of 2D and 3D plotting tools, and the Turbine JIT compiler. Since then, 4,000 unique users have run an .m script with RunMat, with more than 35,000 script runs in total. The runtime has grown to more than 1,200 built-in functions spanning tables and timetables, statistics and machine learning, plotting, signal processing, text analytics, deep learning, finance, file I/O, graphs, and geometry. We also added automatic GPU acceleration across NVIDIA, AMD, Intel, and Apple hardware. RunMat now…from runmat.org
In the maker’s words, at launch
Why build this? MATLAB wasn’t chosen by engineers; it was inherited from classrooms. That unfair advantage let MathWorks sell a decades-old runtime with heavy startup, sluggish hot loops, and paywalled toolboxes. It milks about $500M a year out of the engineering ecosystem for what amounts to an outdated compiler and…
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