Techniques for efficient MATLAB-to-C compilation

Abstract

MATLAB to C translation is foreseen to raise the overall abstraction level when mapping computations to embedded systems (possibly consisting of software and hardware components), and thus for increasing productivity and for providing an automated modeldriven design-flow. This paper describes recent work developed in the context of MATISSE, a MATLAB to C compiler targeting embedded systems. We introduce several techniques to allow the efficient generation of C code, such as weak types, primitives and matrix views. We evaluate the compiler with a set of 9 publicly available benchmarks, targeting both embedded systems and a desktop system. We compare the execution time of the generated C code with the original code running on MATLAB, achieving a geometric mean speedup of 8.1 ×, and qualitatively compare our results with the performance of related approaches. The use of the new techniques allowed the compiler to achieve performance improvements of 46% on average.