I spent the majority of my career porting MATLAB to C++. We charge about $70 an hour ($200 billable man-hour) to do it. It’s a slow and arduous process. Often times the features that are running in Matlab needs some C++ library that prevents the sort of speed increase that you hoped to gain out of the C++ port, so a C++ reimplementation of the toolbox needs to be developed anyway; this loosing the benefit of the “verified“ toolbox. Python, on the other hand can be improved for performance piece-wise through tools like cython and swig. Of course, both offer a C interface, but I prefer the python one to MEX files for a variety of reasons. Also, you don’t have to pay a license to use python. (Same library implementation problems)

Add a minimum, if the MATLAB folks would at least consider moving over to Octave we could illuminate some of the licensing fees, but... once performance matters, you’re still going to have to pay a full-time software engineer to port Octave code to make it performant.