[5] Together with its library routines, GDL is developed to serve as a tool for data analysis and visualization in such disciplines as astronomy,[6] geosciences, and medical imaging.

Other open-source numerical data analysis tools similar to GDL include Julia, Jupyter Notebook, GNU Octave, NCAR Command Language (NCL), Perl Data Language (PDL), R, Scilab, SciPy, and Yorick.

GDL as a language is dynamically-typed, vectorized, and has object-oriented programming capabilities.

GDL supports several data formats, such as NetCDF, HDF (v4 & v5), GRIB, PNG, TIFF, and DICOM.

The source code compiles on Microsoft Windows and other UNIX systems, including Solaris.