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.
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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
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