Is MATLAB Worth It If You Can’t Compile with sym, zeta, or lambertw?
Latest activity Reply by Walter Roberson
on 20 Dec 2025 at 21:01
Developing an application in MATLAB often feels like a natural choice: it offers a unified environment, powerful visualization tools, accessible syntax, and a robust technical ecosystem. But when the goal is to build a compilable, distributable app, the path becomes unexpectedly difficult if your workflow depends on symbolic functions like sym, zeta, or lambertw.
This isn’t a minor technical inconvenience—it’s a structural contradiction. MATLAB encourages the creation of graphical interfaces, input validation, and dynamic visualization. It even provides an Application Compiler to package your code. But the moment you invoke sym, the compiler fails. No clear warning. No workaround. Just: you cannot compile. The same applies to zeta and lambertw, which rely on the symbolic toolbox.
So we’re left asking: how can a platform designed for scientific and technical applications block compilation of functions that are central to those very disciplines?
What Are the Alternatives?
- Rewrite everything numerically, avoiding symbolic logic—often impractical for advanced mathematical workflows.
- Use partial workarounds like matlabFunction, which may work but rarely preserve the original logic or flexibility.
- Switch platforms (e.g., Python with SymPy, Julia), which means rebuilding the architecture and leaving behind MATLAB’s ecosystem.
So, Is MATLAB Still Worth It?
That’s the real question. MATLAB remains a powerful tool for prototyping, teaching, analysis, and visualization. But when it comes to building compilable apps that rely on symbolic computation, the platform imposes limits that contradict its promise.
Is it worth investing time in a MATLAB app if you can’t compile it due to essential mathematical functions? Should MathWorks address this contradiction? Or is it time to rethink our tools?
I’d love to hear your thoughts. Is MATLAB still worth it for serious application development?
1 Comment
Time Descending
Compiling Symbolic Toolbox code is technically difficult, as the code runs in a separate process that is operating-system dependant. Either the code base would have to be completely rewritten, or else MCR would have to be built to include a second operating-system-specific executable against the possibility that the user might want to run symbolic code.
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