Techniques for the translation of MATLAB Programs into Fortran 90

Abstract

This article describes the main techniques developed for FALCON's MATLAB-to-Fortran 90 compiler. FALCON is a programming environment for the development of high-performance scientific programs. It combines static and dynamic inference methods to translate MATLAB programs into Fortran 90. The static inference is supported with advanced value propagation techniques and symbolic algorithms for subscript analysis. Experiments show that FALCON's MATLAB translator can generate code that performs more than 1000 times faster than the interpreted version of MATLAB and substantially faster than commercially available MATLAB compilers on one processor of an SGI Power Challenge. Furthermore, in most cases we have tested, the compiler-generated code is as fast as corresponding hand-written programs.