MC2FOR: A MATLAB TO FORTRAN 95 COMPILER by

MATLAB R © is a dynamic numerical scripting language widely used by scientists, engi-neers and students. While MATLAB’s high-level syntax and dynamic types make it ideal for fast prototyping, programmers often prefer using high-performance static languages such as FORTRAN for their final distribution. Rather than rewriting the code by hand, our solu-tion is to provide a source-to-source compiler that translates the original MATLAB program to an equivalent FORTRAN program. In this thesis, we introduce MC2FOR, a source-to-source compiler which transforms MATLAB to FORTRAN and handles several important challenges during the transforma-tion, such as efficiently estimating the static type characteristics of all the variables in a given MATLAB program, mapping numerous MATLAB built-in functions to FORTRAN, and correctly supporting some MATLAB dynamic features in the generated FORTRAN code. This compiler consists of two major parts. The first part is an interprocedural analysis component to estimate the static type characteristics, such as the shapes of the arrays and the ranges of the scalars, which are used to generate variable declarations and to remove unnecessary array bounds checking in the translated FORTRAN program. The second part is an extensible FORTRAN code generation framework automatically transforming MATLAB constructs to equivalent FORTRAN constructs. This work has been implemented within the McLab framework, and we evaluated the performance of the MC2FOR compiler on a collection of 20 MATLAB benchmarks. For most of the benchmarks, the generated FORTRAN program runs 1.2 to 337 times faster than the original MATLAB program, and in terms of physical lines of code, typically grows only by a factor of around 2. These experimental results show that the code generated by MC2FOR performs better on average, at the cost of only a modest increase in code size. i i