Tutorial we presented at PLDI 2011

Introduction to McLab, a compiler and VM framework for MATLAB

Click here to get our slides

Presenters: Laurie Hendren, Rahul Garg and Nurudeen Lameed

MATLAB is a popular dynamic programming language used for scientific and numerical programming. As a language, it has evolved from a small scripting language intended as an interactive interface to numerical libraries, to a very popular language supporting many language features and libraries. The overloaded syntax and dynamic nature of the language, plus the somewhat organic addition of language features over the years, makes static analysis of modern MATLAB quite challenging. Furthermore, there is a real lack of publicly-available tools which has inhibited research on this very important real-world language.

The purpose of this tutorial is to introduce McLab, a new publicly-available toolkit for analyzing and executing MATLAB programs. The tutorial starts by introducing the MATLAB language and the particular challenges the language presents for compiler developers. It then presents the McLab front-end, which supports both standard MATLAB, prebuilt extensions such as AspectMatlab, and the ability to create new language extensions. The middle part of the tutorial focuses on the IRs and analysis framework along with some example analyses. The final part of the tutorial presents the back-ends, with a particular emphasis on the McVM JIT.

Structure of the Tutorial

The tutorial follows the structure of the toolkit. There are four major parts:

• Introduce the MATLAB language and the specific challenges this language raises for compiler researchers.
• Introduce the front-end, showing the overall structure and the basics of how to make a language extension.
• Describe the analysis framework and some sample analyses.
• Give an overview of McFor and McVM as examples of static and dynamic backends.