By Cleve Moler, MathWorks
The primary objective of MCC, the new MATLAB compiler, is to make MATLAB® programs run faster. Without the compiler, MATLAB is an interpreted computing environment with dynamic storage allocation. Compiling programs eliminates the interpretive overhead and, more importantly, provides faster storage management. MCC translates MATLAB functions into equivalent functions in the C language. These functions are then processed by the C compiler for a particular machine to produce either MEX-files for use in MATLAB or external functions for use in other programs outside of MATLAB.
In this article, originally published in 1996, Cleve Moler uses examples to detail the way the MATLAB compiler can speed mathematical computations by compiling MATLAB functions.