Matwrap: a wrapper generator for matrix languages

Matwrap is a tool for interfacing C++ code into matrix-oriented scripting languages such as Matlab 5, Octave, and tela. It generates all the code to convert from the scripting language's internal types into the types that your C++ code understands (e.g., double, char *, float *, struct abc *). You do not need to understand any of the API details of the language to use your C++ code; just give matwrap a .h file describing your functions.

Brief list of features:

• Functions are automatically vectorized.
• Arguments containing dimensions of other vector and matrix arguments can be computed automatically and need not be specified.
• Pointers to structures and classes are supported. Public member functions of classes may be called, and public data members may be evaluated or set. Inheritance is supported.

Available from this site:

• Download latest version (0.57).
• Recent changes
• The documentation (also in the distribution).
• Demonstration. Enter prototypes of the functions you want wrapped and see what it does. You can use this to wrap your functions if you don't want to bother downloading the whole distribution, or if for some reason you can't get the distribution to run properly on your system; just paste your .h file into the entry box and copy the resulting output back onto a file on your system.
• The wrapper for the entire PGPLOT plotting library for octave, for those who just want the plotting library without the wrapper generator.

Several examples are contained in the distribution, including the wrapper for the pgplot plotting library, and a neuron simulator written as a C++ class. I'd like to include a lot more examples of its use, so feel free to send me anything that might be appropriate.

Matwrap requires a relatively recent version of perl (it was tested with version 5.004 and 5.005) and a C++ compiler that supports alloca (such as gcc). A C++ compiler is currently needed even if you are wrapping C code. Matwrap has been developed on unix; the generation of the wrapper code itself should be more or less the same on all platforms, but the procedure for linking the code to the scripting language will probably be different.

Other resources

The Mathtools web site is a good place for online information about matlab and extensions.

Another wrapper generator called SWIG exists for languages such as perl, python, and tcl. Someday, hopefully, the matrix handling features of Matwrap will be incorporated into SWIG, but for the moment they are entirely separate.