COMPILER TECHNIQUES FOR MATLAB PROGRAMS ... - CiteSeerX

have been made to the source language to allow ecient C code to be produced, such as
the exclusion of all primitives for synchronization and communication, except for message
passing. Some sort of type inference system is alluded to by the authors in their papers, but
it is not described.
A simple approach for the compilation of MATLAB was taken by [Ker95] to translate
MATLAB into C++. In this work, a matrix class was created to take careofalltype and
shape inference decisions during run-time. This class is then utilized by the generated C++.
So, eectively, the control structure is compiled, but all the mathematical operations are
still interpreted within this matrix class.
Recently, MathWorks released MCC, a MATLAB Compiler [Mat95] that translates MAT-
LAB programs into C for stand-alone external applications, or into C MEX-les which are
called within the MATLAB environment. MEX-les are MATLAB-callable C or Fortran dynamically
linked subroutines that are built with a special interface module. From [Mat95],
it appears that MCC performs only simple inference and relies upon user provided ags,
pragmas, and assertions 1
to optimize the generated C code. In Chapter 7 we compare the
performance of the codes generated by MCCandby our compiler for a set of MATLAB
programs.
1 Assertions are M-les functions that are installed by the compiler and used to specify the intrinsic type
or rank of a variable.
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