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From: Walter Roberson <roberson@hushmail.com>
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Subject: Re: Converting Matlab .m file into C code
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Date: Thu, 09 Oct 2008 12:54:13 -0500
Xref: news.mathworks.com comp.soft-sys.matlab:494416


John Reilly wrote:
> For those of you who want to convert MATLAB to C, the fundamental question is:  Why?
> What do you hope to gain?

Experience suggests that when people ask for this, they are asking for one of three things:

A) A deployment tool similar in effect to the Matlab compiler, but without the cost associated
with the official Matlab compiler; Or

B) A deployment tool similar in effect to the Matlab compiler, but which produces *much* smaller
packages by only including the parts of Matlab that are "actually used" for the program;
said package should include a magic version of BLAS (and similar libraries) that is
simultaneously optimized for all possible target processors so the delivered executable will
"just work" (but of course, only the portions of those libraries that will actually be called
upon should be included); Or

C) A tool that will speed up their code by a factor of at least 20 (worst case), with 80 to 100 times
speedup -expected-, because "everyone knows" that Matlab is much slower than C.

> Walter covered all this, I know.  But he could answer you a lot better if you'd tell him
> *WHY* you want to convert to C.

Unfortunately Walter has no "better" answer to any of the above situations than he has
already posted. Walter is a Mathworks customer, not a Mathworks employee, and Mathworks
typically doesn't tell him much more than "This will be fixed in a future release".