Techniques for the translation of MATLAB programs into Fortran 90

This article describes the main techniques developed for FALCON's MATLAB-to -Fortran 90 compiler. FALCON is a programming environment for the developme nt of high-performance scientific programs, It combines static and dynamic inference methods to translate MATLAB programs into Fortran 90. The-static inference is supported with advanced value propagation techniques and symbo lic algorithms for subscript analysis. Experiments show that FALCON's MATLA B translator can generate code that performs more than 1000 times faster th an the interpreted version of MATLAB and substantially faster than commerci ally available MATLAB compilers on one processor of an SGI Power Challenge. Furthermore, in most cases we have tested, the compiler-generated code is as fast as corresponding hand-written programs.