Sci2C is a tool capable to translate Scilab code into C code.
It is a standalone toolbox of Scilab and it has been primarily developed to
become the interface between the Scilab scientific software package and the
hArtes design flow.
The output C code is in a plain style and does not include any part of the
Scilab interpreter thus making it small, efficient and easy to interface to the
hArtes tool chain.
In other words, the generated C code is standalone and minimal in the sense that
Scilab interpreter is no longer needed and only the minimal number of C files
which are necessary to execute the application are generated. It follows that
the generated code can be embedded in processors or used as entries for other
software.
Sci2C is implemented in Scilab language, so it naturally becomes a Scilab
toolbox available in the Scilab installation program and consequently it can be
directly used in the Scilab Development Environment.
The implementation of Sci2C is mainly based on the introduction of data and
function annotations into Scilab code which is seen as comment by the Scilab
interpreter, but that are used by Sci2C to translate the Scilab code into an
efficient and plain C code. Moreover the use of annotations allows the user to
specify not only the size of data but also their precision, in that way it is
possible to get a further optimization of the C code produced thanks to the
possibility to use ad-hoc precision for each data to be processed.
Two major limitations can be identified in Sci2C: the first limitation of the
tool is that the annotations must be manually added by the user, although it is
the only manual intervention required by the tool; the second limitation is that
the size of data is fixed and consequently no dynamic array extension is
allowed.
Other minor limitations have been introduced in order to simplify the
development of the tool without impacting on the usefulness of it for embedded
systems.
