mat

Planned, wave 2: MAT-files v4, v5, v7 and v7.3.

Status: planned (wave 2). No code exists. The package name is provisional.

What it will provide

MAT v4: a 20-byte header per matrix.
MAT v5 and v7: a 128-byte header and tagged data elements, with zlib compression (miCOMPRESSED) in v7.
MAT v7.3: an HDF5 file with a 512-byte user block, the MATLAB_class attribute, complex numbers as compound types and sparse matrices as groups, written and read on top of h5.

References

Subject	Reference
v4, v5, v7, v7.3	MathWorks, MAT-File Format

How it will be validated

Area	Criterion
reading	exact equality of the values read against the oracle
round trip	Go writes and SciPy (v4 to v7) or h5py (v7.3) reads, with identical arrays; Go reads their files
hostile input	`go test -fuzz` for panics; a limit on the allocation a hostile header can ask for

scipy.io (loadmat, savemat) is the oracle for v4, v5 and v7, and does not support v7.3. Corpus: SciPy’s scipy/io/matlab/tests/data (BSD-3-Clause). Every item also needs unit tests at 100% coverage and a performance table against the reference.

Created on October 23, 2026 by tannevaled

Modified on October 23, 2026 by tannevaled