Abstract

In this paper, we describe the inference mechanism used by the FALCON system to translate MATLABl programs to Fortran 90. FALCON is a programming environment for the development of scientific libraries and applications. The objective of the MATLAB compiler is to allow program development to take place in a user--friendly, interactive environment without sacrificing performance. FALCON’s inference mechanism combines static and dynamic inference methods for intrinsic type, rank, and shape inference, and is supported by a sophisticated symbolic value propagation algorithm. Experimental results show that FALCON’s MATLAB compiler can genera ~ code that is over 1000 times faster than MATLAB on a uniprocessor SGI Power Challenge, and is often as fast as handwritten Fortran programs.