This is a part of a quite large system that does a lot of things. I do not want to wrap everything inside julia, that would force me to rewrite everything in julia. I just need to invert a few 4x4 linear systems from inside a shell script. I agree that this is not a very representative use case, and maybe it is irrelevant for most people. Yet, if I try to evangelize julia in my lab this problem blocks it, and it is better to stick to octave.