An SCons Tool for MATLAB

Marc Joliet marcec@gmx.de

Introduction

This is an SCons tool for compiling Mex extensions and programs that call to the MATLAB engine. It adds a 'MATLAB' dict to your build systems env that contains potentially interesting information, e.g., you can get MATLABs library directory via env["MATLAB"]["LIB_DIR"]. More importantly, it defines a Mex() pseudo-builder that wraps the SharedLibrary builder.

The Mex() pseudo-builder takes care of the following:

• adding necessary compiler options
• adding the minimal set of necessary linker options (see Usage below)
• automatically adding mexversion.c (mexversion.rc on Windows) to the source file list (for older MATLAB versions).

Basically, it follows the guidelines in the section "Custom Building MEX-Files" of the MATLAB documentation.

Installation

The SCons MATLAB tool depends on

• Python (2.5 or newer)
• SCons (obviously)
• MATLAB (the earliest version I tested with is R2007a)

If your project uses git, you could add this repository as a git submodule in the site_scons/site_tools directory. Otherwise, you can copy it there or clone the repository into $HOME/.scons/site_scons/site_tools (or the equivalent directory on Windows). In all cases, the tool directory should be named matlab.

Usage

Use this as you would any other SCons extension: add it to the tools argument of Environment(), for example:

env = Environment(tools = ['default', 'matlab'])

To compile a Mex source file, use the method Mex(), like so:

mex_ext = env.Mex("mex_ext", ["mex_ext.c"])

Mex() takes care of adding necessary compiler options (e.g., -fexception) and linker options (e.g., -lmx). Keep in mind, however, that Mex() intends to only do the minimal amount of necessary work, that is, it does not do things that are unnecessary for a minimal Mex file. For instance, it links to the smallest possible set of libraries (i.e., mex and mx). Therefor, if you use MATLAB libraries other than mx and mex, you need to link to them yourself.

It is also important to know that this builder modifies the environment it is called from. If this is undesirable, Clone()-ing the environment might be a suitable workaround.

On first run, a MATLAB instance must be started. The tool then stores the following construction variables in env['MATLAB']:

• MEX_EXT -> The extension of MEX files on this computer.
• ROOT -> MATLAB's installation location (e.g., /usr/local/matlab/).
• ARCH -> MATLAB's architecture (e.g., "GLNX86").
• VERSION -> MATLAB's version (e.g., "7.10.0.499").
• RELEASE -> MATLAB's release (e.g., "R2010a").
• SRC -> MATLAB's src/ directory.
• INCLUDE -> MATLAB's include/ directory.
• LIB_DIR -> The directory containing MATLAB's libraries.

These are static per MATLAB installation, and are cached via Python's pickle module. If you change your MATLAB installation, you can delete the file .matlab_vars_cache to update the information.

Related Software

There is an alternative builder on the SCons Wiki, called MexBuilder. The difference to this tool is mainly that it executes the mex program, while the Mex() pseudo-builder in this tool wraps the SharedLibrary() builder.

License

See the file LICENSE.