Abstract
Matlab is an extremely popular programming language used by scientists, engineers, researchers and students world-wide. Despite its popularity, it has received very little attention from compiler researchers. This paper introduces McSaf, an open-source static analysis framework which is intended to enable more compiler research for Matlab and extensions of Matlab. The framework is based on an intermediate representation (IR) called McLast, which has been designed to capture all the key features of Matlab, while at the same time being simple for program analysis. The paper describes both the IR and the procedure for creating the IR from the higher-level AST. The analysis framework itself provides visitor-based traversals including fixed-point-based traversals to support both forwards and backwards analyses. McSaf has been implemented as part of the McLab project, and the framework has already been used for a variety of analyses, both for Matlab and the AspectMatlab extension.
This work was supported, in part, by NSERC. A special thanks to Soroush Radpour for his help with the experiments.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
GNU Octave, http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/index.html
JastAdd, http://jastadd.org/
McLAB (2011), http://www.sable.mcgill.ca/mclab/
Almási, G., Padua, D.: MaJIC: compiling MATLAB for speed and responsiveness. In: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2002 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pp. 294–303. ACM, New York (2002)
Casey, A., Hendren, L.: MetaLexer: A modular lexical specification language. In: AOSD, pp. 7–18 (2011)
Chevalier-Boisvert, M., Hendren, L., Verbrugge, C.: Optimizing Matlab through Just-In-Time Specialization. In: Gupta, R. (ed.) CC 2010. LNCS, vol. 6011, pp. 46–65. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Derose, L., De Rose, L., Gallivan, K., Gallivan, K., Gallopoulos, E., Gallopoulos, E., Marsolf, B., Marsolf, B., Padua, D., Padua, D.: FALCON: A MATLAB Interactive Restructuring Compiler. In: Huang, C.-H., Sadayappan, P., Banerjee, U., Gelernter, D., Nicolau, A., Padua, D.A. (eds.) LCPC 1995. LNCS, vol. 1033, pp. 269–288. Springer, Heidelberg (1996)
Doherty, J.: McSAF: An extensible static analysis framework for the MATLAB language. Master’s thesis. McGill University (December 2011)
Doherty, J., Hendren, L., Radpour, S.: Kind analysis for MATLAB. In: OOPSLA (2011)
Dubrau, A.: Taming MATLAB. Master’s thesis. McGill University (April 2012)
Ekman, T., Hedin, G.: The JastAdd extensible Java compiler. In: OOPSLA 2007: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming Systems and Applications, pp. 1–18. ACM, New York (2007)
Ekman, T., Hedin, G.: The JastAdd system – modular extensible compiler construction. Science of Computer Programming 69(1-3), 14–26 (2007)
Joisha, P.G.: A Type Inferenence System for MATLAB with Applications to Code Optimization. Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University (2003)
Joisha, P.G., Banerjee, P.: The MAGICA Type Inference Engine for MATLAB. In: Hedin, G. (ed.) CC 2003. LNCS, vol. 2622, pp. 121–125. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Lattner, C., Adve, V.: LLVM: a compilation framework for lifelong program analysis and transformation. In: CGO, pp. 75–88 (2004)
Li, J.: McFor: A MATLAB to FORTRAN 95 compiler. Master’s thesis. McGill University (August 2009)
Nilsson-Nyman, E., Hedin, G., Magnusson, E., Ekman, T.: Declarative intraprocedural flow analysis of Java source code. Electron. Notes Theor. Comput. Sci. 238, 155–171 (2009)
Radpour, S.: Understanding and Refactoring MATLAB. Master’s thesis, McGill University (April 2012)
Rose, L.D., Padua, D.: Techniques for the translation of MATLAB programs into Fortran 90. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. 21(2), 286–323 (1999)
Toheed Aslam, A.D., Doherty, J., Hendren, L.: AspectMatlab: An aspect-oriented scientific programming language. In: AOSD, pp. 181–192 (March 2010)
Vallée-Rai, R., Gagnon, E.M., Hendren, L., Lam, P., Pominville, P., Sundaresan, V.: Optimizing Java Bytecode Using the Soot Framework: Is It Feasible? In: Watt, D.A. (ed.) CC 2000. LNCS, vol. 1781, pp. 18–34. Springer, Heidelberg (2000)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Doherty, J., Hendren, L. (2012). McSAF: A Static Analysis Framework for MATLAB. In: Noble, J. (eds) ECOOP 2012 – Object-Oriented Programming. ECOOP 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7313. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31057-7_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31057-7_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-31056-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-31057-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)