Scilab for macOS (and more)

Scilab is an Open source software for numerical computations developed by the Scilab Team at 3DS and by academic contributors.

This page aims to bring macOS and Windows builds of Scilab (official builds for Linux, Windows and general information can be found on http://www.scilab.org). Ressources for preparing and making available these specific macOS and Windows builds of Scilab are provided by the University of Technology of Compiègne (UTC).

Scilab Discourse forum

Scilab has now a discourse forum https://scilab.discourse.group. If you need some help of just want to know what's going about Scilab click on the link, browse the actual topics, create an account, and create a new topic/question !

License

The macOS build is distributed under the same license as Scilab, i.e. GPL v2.

Prerequisites

Scilab builds available on this page run on macOS Mavericks (10.9) up to Ventura (13) supporting Intel and newer M1 machines. See the eventual details of installation in the « Troubleshooting » section.

Scilab versions

You will find below the latests available Scilab builds for macOS. The 2023.1.0 version is the current stable version. You will also find some preview builds (based on the previous 6.1 branch) including the experimental SUNDIALS and ColPack modules which provide new full featured ODE, DAE and algebraic equations solvers for large scale systems (look for "Sundials" and "ColPack" help chapter). This development build is available for macOS and for Windows 64 bits in the "Sundials/Colpack preview builds" section below.

Files (macOS)

Archive name

Build date

Size

scilab-2023.1.0-x86_64.dmg 

23/05/2023

253MB

scilab-2023.0.0-x86_64.dmg

10/03/2023

252MB

scilab-6.1.1-x86_64.dmg

24/02/2022

179MB

scilab-6.0.2-x86_64.dmg

04/11/2019

273MB

Sundials/Colpack preview builds (Windows and macOS)

Archive name

Build date

Size

scilab-branch-6.1_x64-sundials.exe

07/12/2022

177MB

scilab-branch-6.1-x86_64-sundials.dmg

08/12/2022

228MB


Troubleshooting

Problems with macOS Catalina, Big Sur or Monterey

macOS Catalina introduced new security controls. For example, apps are now required to ask your permission before accessing parts of the drive where documents and personal files are kept. If Scilab does not show files in the FileBrowser component, you will have to enable the command-line interpreter /bin/sh (which is run just after you double-click on Scilab's icon) in the "Privacy" tab in the System Preferences Control Panel. This small video shows how to find the /bin folder by using the keys combination Command-Shift-G and then drag and drop /bin/sh in the list of authorized applications.

Mac M1 machines

Newer Mac M1 machines need the Rosetta 2 binary dynamic translator to execute applications compiled for Intel architecture. If you never run such an application on your Mac M1 it will complain when trying to launch Scilab for the first time, with the message: You don't have the permission to open the application "Scilab". To solve this you need to install Rosetta from the command line. Locate and lauch the "Terminal" application, then type the following on the command line :

softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license

Then relaunch Scilab from its icon, and continue the installation.

Native arm64 build for Mac M1 machines

Mac M1 users can also download the native arm64 build below and compare the performance with the x86_64 using Rosetta. Note concerning the native arm64 JDK: If you don't have particular needs for a given version, let Scilab download and install the JDK by itself when it is launched for the first time (it will be downloaded from https://www.azul.com). Be also warned that this native build cannot use Atoms modules using C/C++ gateways for the moment since these have to be rebuilt in order to include the libraries for both architectures.

OpenBLAS vs. Accelerate Framework

We provide two different builds, the first one uses the default Accelerate Framework (which includes the default macOS Apple provided BLAS and LAPACK library) and the second one uses OpenBLAS (see https://www.openblas.net). Since the Accelerate framework seems to have a only a partial use of the new M1 features, you may experience different performance between the OpenBLAS and the Accelerate build and depending on the kind of computation the faster may be one or the other.

Archive name

Build date

Size

scilab-6.1.1-accelerate-arm64.dmg

31/08/2021

176M

scilab-6.1.1-openblas-arm64.dmg

31/08/2021

176M

Other issues

If you have problems that are not mentioned in this page please report them at https://scilab.discourse.group.