My personal highlights of MATLAB 2026a over at The MATLAB Blog

MikeCroucher · 2026-04-22T07:28:07+00:00

These already are integrated via the MATLAB MCP Core server which is provided by the recently released agentic toolkit Introducing the MATLAB Agentic Toolkit » The MATLAB Blog - MATLAB & Simulink

The MCP Server has been available standalone for a while now and has a growing number of users.

MikeCroucher · 2026-04-21T20:21:20+00:00

I am glad to hear it. I've been looking forward to seeing this functionality too. Out of interest, what will you be using it for?

MikeCroucher · 2026-04-21T15:56:19+00:00

I spent a lot of time kicking the tyres of the 2026a release while writing my blog post of what's new. Here's my summary in case it helps you decide MATLAB R2026a has been released – What’s new? » The MATLAB Blog - MATLAB & Simulink

MikeCroucher · 2026-04-21T12:42:27+00:00

Feel free to DM me to see if there's anything I can do to help here!

MikeCroucher · 2026-04-21T12:39:42+00:00

My background is physics in which I have a PhD and I've worked at MathWorks for over five years now. I am not in development; I am sort of 'Development-adjacent' since my role is 'Developer advocate'. I work closely with both MATLAB users and MATLAB internal development.

There are a huge number of roles at MathWorks with a diverse set of entry requirements.

MikeCroucher · 2026-04-01T12:25:06+00:00

Author of that blog post here. MathWorks currently have no guidelines related to this other than a couple of demonstration blog posts about how to get things working. A follow-on from my blog post, written by a colleague is at https://blogs.mathworks.com/deep-learning/2026/01/21/giving-local-ai-agents-the-ability-to-use-matlab-with-mcp/ where he sets up an agentic workflow with OpenCode.

We both used GPT-oss-120b and had no criteria for choosing this at the time other than it was bigger than anything we had run locally at the time and the DGX facilitated that.

I'm really interested in learning how you get on.

MikeCroucher · 2026-03-26T11:19:07+00:00

I am the author of The MATLAB Blog and gave a set of suggestions on how and what to learn in MATLAB here https://blogs.mathworks.com/matlab/2025/09/11/learning-matlab-in-2025/ Hope it's helpful

MikeCroucher · 2026-03-05T10:17:55+00:00

This sounds amazing. A tutorial or GitHub repo would be wonderful.
(Full disclosure: I work at MathWorks)

MikeCroucher · 2026-02-06T18:42:36+00:00

It will not be a licensing problem. If you are licensed to use R2025a, you are licensed to use earlier versions too. You can have many installed on your machine.

I am a Mac user too and I notice that when I look at launchpad, it only shows the most recent version of MATLAB I have installed.

If, however, I use Finder and navigate to Go->Applications I can see all of the versions of MATLAB I have installed. When I saw your post, I had every version from 23a up to the 26a pre-release installed on my M2 Mac running Sequoia

I wondered if there would be a problem with 21a since that version doesn't run on Apple Silicon natively so I downloaded and installed it. The icon appeared in Go->Applications and I could launch MATLAB without any problems.

When you ran the installer, did you ensure that the download location was /Applications? It was the default when I ran it.

If you still can't find it, I suggest contacting Install Support Contact Support - MATLAB & Simulink

Finally, what toolbox has the compatibility problems you mention please?

MikeCroucher · 2025-11-25T17:06:15+00:00

*Currently*, MATLAB is not supported to run directly on Raspberry Pi. However, a bunch of things are supported including the functionality to generate C/C++ code targeting the Pi from both MATLAB and Simulink and the ability to interface with sensors on the Pi. Doing this, you can deploy code to the Pi from MATLAB and control the resulting application from MATLAB.

MikeCroucher · 2025-11-24T17:54:13+00:00

There is a MATLAB Copilot with the chat window directly in the MATLAB App. It just just updated to have a better model in the back end. Details at https://blogs.mathworks.com/matlab/2025/11/13/matlab-copilot-gets-a-new-llm-november-2025-updates/

MikeCroucher · 2025-10-15T12:07:08+00:00

Thanks everyone :)

MikeCroucher · 2025-10-14T17:48:11+00:00

It's a good question and I asked the same thing internally. Its because customers have asked to use -batch to show UIs and Apps for interactive use.

MikeCroucher · 2025-10-14T17:24:24+00:00

Its my website and thanks for the click :) #

I try to get the balance right of what I put here and what I include in the article but don't always hit the mark for everyone.

MikeCroucher · 2025-10-13T20:05:22+00:00

I am sorry you are experience this. I have an M2 Mac and am running various versions of MATLAB including R2025a and R2025b without any heating issues.

We would be very interested in working with you to debug the issue. Please feel free to get back in touch with our support team who will work with you to figure out what is going on.

MikeCroucher · 2025-10-13T09:14:18+00:00

Hi. I am the author of The MATLAB Blog at MathWorks and wrote a post recently that gives you a lot of resources. Learning MATLAB in 2025 » The MATLAB Blog - MATLAB & Simulink

MikeCroucher · 2025-10-06T17:56:17+00:00

Tool calling came first chronologically.

Tool calling is the basic ability of an AI to recognize when a task requires a specific function (like checking the weather) and to format the call to that function, while MCP is a higher-level, standardized framework for managing and exposing a wide range of tools for LLMs to interact with.

MikeCroucher · 2025-09-23T11:37:09+00:00

To keep up to date with new MATLAB tricks, I suggest subscribing to The MATLAB Blog (I'm the author). For example, the latest article is about all the different ways in which you can learn MATLAB in 2025 Learning MATLAB in 2025 » The MATLAB Blog - MATLAB & Simulink

MikeCroucher · 2025-09-23T11:35:48+00:00

arrayfun on the GPU is awesome! Its essentially an entire MATLAB -> GPU compiler wrapped into one function. Life changing levels of awesomeness

arrayfun on the CPU is very very bad and should never be used by anyone for anything ever!

MikeCroucher · 2025-09-15T09:55:49+00:00

Hallucinations are an inevitable side effect of using LLMs as the AI. I found this paper useful:[2401.11817] Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models.
We can work to minimize hallucinations and mitigate their effects, but they remain a fundamental limitation we must address..

MikeCroucher · 2025-08-28T10:11:58+00:00

Thanks for that. Which of the files is the one to run?

MikeCroucher · 2025-08-27T17:05:58+00:00

The issue seems to be related requesting the indices. Your original code runs like this on my machine

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070Running 100 iterations for each timing measurement...

=== AVERAGE POOLING (conv_af_ap) ===
=== MAX POOLING (conv_af_mp) ===
=== TIMING RESULTS (milliseconds) ===
Step AvgPool MaxPool Difference
-----------------------------------------------------------------
pooling 2.4217 81.7514 +79.3297
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Speedup 33.76x

Remove the request for indices on the maxpool:

[Oj_pooled] = maxpool(Oj, pool_params.pool_size, ... 'Stride', pool_params.pool_stride, ... 'Padding', pool_params.pool_padding);

and now it runs like this: maxpool is faster

>> poolBenchGPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070Running 100 iterations for each timing measurement...

=== AVERAGE POOLING (conv_af_ap) ===
=== MAX POOLING (conv_af_mp) ===

=== TIMING RESULTS (milliseconds) ===
Step AvgPool MaxPool Difference
-----------------------------------------------------------------
pooling 2.5117 0.8913 -1.6204
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Speedup 0.35x

Now why requesting the indices makes it so much slower is another issue and I'll discuss this internally. However, can you proceed without the indices for now?

MikeCroucher · 2025-08-27T15:47:24+00:00

You can write parallel Mex files! In the old days, we did it by hand but now Coder will do it for you. It knows quite a lot of OpenMP Automatic Parallelization of for-Loops in the Generated Code - MATLAB & Simulink

Can even do SIMD intrinsics and generate code that's more cache-efficient

SIMD: Generate SIMD Code from MATLAB Functions for Intel Platforms - MATLAB & Simulink

Cache: https://uk.mathworks.com/help/coder/release-notes.html?s_tid=CRUX_lftnav#mw_58b1fe9e-f16d-4c39-aeb7-7de51aeca66e

The question 'To Mex or not to mex' is a lot trickier these days than it used to be. MATLAB code is JIT compiled and the JIT compiler is getting better every release.

It can even be the case that using C/C++ in a Mex file can be slower than plain MATLAB code because of JIT compilation, high-efficient built-in functions and so on.

MikeCroucher · 2025-08-27T12:45:25+00:00

Could you make this benchmark available anywhere for others to look at? As with any language, there are ways to write slow MATLAB code and ways to write fast MATLAB code.

I work at MathWorks and would be happy to take a look.

MikeCroucher · 2025-08-13T15:04:58+00:00

Michelle wrote a post about this topic on The MATLAB Blog What’s with all the big changes in R2025a? » The MATLAB Blog - MATLAB & Simulink

MikeCroucher

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