MatlabCompat.jl: helping Julia understand Your Matlab/Octave Code
This addresses the burden of non-vectorized MATLAB/Octave code for researchers in the academic community by facilitating modernization to Julia, though it is incremental as it builds on existing language similarities.
The paper tackles the problem of porting legacy MATLAB/Octave code to Julia by introducing MatlabCompat.jl, a library that simplifies conversion, and demonstrates its use in an image analysis case to achieve high performance in Julia.
Scientific legacy code in MATLAB/Octave not compatible with modernization of research workflows is vastly abundant throughout academic community. Performance of non-vectorized code written in MATLAB/Octave represents a major burden. A new programming language for technical computing Julia, promises to address these issues. Although Julia syntax is similar to MATLAB/Octave, porting code to Julia may be cumbersome for researchers. Here we present MatlabCompat.jl - a library aimed at simplifying the conversion of your MATLAB/Octave code to Julia. We show using a simplistic image analysis use case that MATLAB/Octave code can be easily ported to high performant Julia using MatlabCompat.jl.