Install libmatio with Homebrew, apt, pacman

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• matdump

Project history

The project is hosted on SourceForge and its documentation describes MATIO as an open-source C library for binary MATLAB MAT files. The README explains the practical motivation: programs and libraries may need MAT-file access even when they do not have MATLAB or do not want to depend on MATLAB shared libraries.

MATIO evolved around the details of MATLAB's changing file formats, especially the older v4/v5 formats and HDF5-backed MAT files. Later release notes show continuing work on HDF5 compatibility, Unicode filenames, large files, CMake support, security fixes for crafted files, and the matdump command-line utility.

Adoption history

MATIO's adoption is mostly invisible infrastructure: it appears as libmatio or libmatio-dev in Unix package managers and is useful to projects that need MAT-file interchange rather than a full MATLAB runtime. The project's own acknowledgements name contributors and users from numerical, simulation, and scientific software communities, including Scilab, OpenMEEG, Nelson, and the Modelica Association.

For Homebrew users, libmatio provides the library and matdump executable as a normal formula, which makes MATLAB data inspection and conversion available in scripts on macOS and Linux without installing a larger scientific stack.

How it is used

Developers use MATIO through its C API to open MAT files, inspect variables, and read or write arrays and metadata. The matdump utility gives package users a quick command-line way to examine MAT-file contents.

The package is especially useful around mixed MATLAB, Octave, Scilab, Python, C, and Fortran workflows where .mat files are the interchange format but the producer and consumer are not both MATLAB.

Why package nerds care

MATIO is a classic package-nerd dependency: few users install it for its own interface, but many scientific packages need the capability it provides. It turns a proprietary application's file format into a portable Unix library dependency.

Its maintenance history also shows why small file-format libraries matter: release notes repeatedly mention bounds checks, CVEs, HDF5 compatibility, and build-system portability, all of which affect downstream scientific tools more than end-user headlines.

Timeline

• 2000s: MATIO becomes a SourceForge-hosted C library for MATLAB MAT-file I/O.
• 2018: MATIO 1.5.12 adds append support for struct arrays in HDF5 MAT files and fixes character-array handling.
• 2020: MATIO 1.5.18 adds CMake support and updates HDF5 and Windows filename handling.
• 2022: MATIO 1.5.22 adds support for reading large MAT files and fixes crafted-file heap overflows.
• 2026: MATIO 1.5.30 is released with const-correctness changes, a Mat_VarCreateStruct deprecation, and memory-leak fixes.

Related projects

• MATLAB and GNU Octave are the main ecosystems that make MAT files a common interchange target.
• HDF5 is important for newer MAT-file variants and appears repeatedly in MATIO release notes.
• JMatIO and MAT-file I/O libraries for LabVIEW cover similar interchange needs in other language or tool ecosystems.

Sources

• https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/libmatio
• https://github.com/tbeu/matio
• https://github.com/tbeu/matio/releases
• https://matio.sourceforge.net/
• https://sourceforge.net/p/matio/news/
• https://sourceforge.net/projects/matio/