RunMat is an interesting idea, but a lot of MATLAB's utility comes from the toolboxes, and unless RunMat supports every single toolbox I need, I'm going to be reaching for that expensive MATLAB license over and over again.
Will have a really solid rust inspired package manager soon, and a single #macro to expose a rust function in the RunMat script's namespace (= easy to bring any aspects of the rust ecosystem to RunMat).
When I've had to write similar code in Python, it's a massive pain to "prove" that my conversation code is correct. Often I've resorted to using MATLAB's trusted functions to generate "truth" data and then feeding that to Python to verify it gets the same results.
Obviously this is more work than just using the premade stuff that comes with the toolbox.
Any MATLAB alternative faces the same trust issue. Until it reaches enough mindshare that people assume that it's too popular to have incorrect math (which might not be a good assumption but it is one that people make about MATLAB) then it doesn't actually mimic the main benefit of MATLAB which is that I don't need to check its work.