Hey Jordi, thanks.
Their framework may need to support Octave, and so far no one I have talked to knows of any prior usage. What I will do is try to understand more details of their implementation during the coming months so I have something more concrete to add.
As an example, I cannot enter one whole family of our algorithms into the contest because of Mathworks $$$. But I might try to do it in Octave. I am not entirely familiar with how independently an executable can be built in Octave, but if it can be completely linked (unlike Mathworks), and depends only on libc, etc., I might be able to enter using Octave and a pre-compiled binary.
A contest is typically built in three phases:
1) Training. Data is downloaded onto contestant's CPU, algorithm built and tested.
2) Testing. Algorithm uploaded into TopCoder framework, run without contestant.
3) Scoring. Ditto
2) & 3) might require matching ABI, this is the part I will try to figure out. (June)
Thanks.