A real freeware alternative to Matlab?

Question

I need GUI, so that rules Octave out. Scilab is ok for functionality, but it takes minutes to draw a simple plot...too slow. I don't need it to be open source, just freeware. I tried freemat too, but all these fine programs have poor speed performance. Can you offer me something that can do the trick? BTW I'm working on DSP audio stuff.

Answer 1

Try Maxima.

http://maxima.sourceforge.net/

Answer 2

I'm not familiar with any additional tools, but have you consider building the software from source with the optimizations specific to your hardware system.  This should give some speed increase over the basic pre-built binaries.  Also, remember that you are dealing with an interpreted environment.  If you want faster performance look towards developing your own tools with the aid of existing numerical & plotting libraries that are available as open source.