What kinds of uses of SymbolicC (introduced in Mathematica 8) do you foresee? Are there any neat examples already?

Question

Mathematica 8 introduced SymbolicC, a set of Mathematica functions that capture C language constructions in the familiar Mathematica tree-like fashion. Additionally, there are functions to write SymbolicC trees as straight C code to a file. The tutorial clearly explains the functions, but -as far as I know- it doesn't provide any examples of useful applications of this capability.

It sounds like it should be tremendously useful, but I have a hard time coming up with some creative uses of my own. A couple of years ago, I used Mathematica to 'flatten out' a recursive algorithm I had written in C to gain some speed. Mathematica wrote the whole program for me pasting C phrases together I had prepared in strings. SymbolicC would have been much neater, though not really necessary.

Yesterday, Leonid Shifrin came up with a very nice application of symbolicC to make an alternative of CForm that doesn't make calls to the auxiliary function Power(). That's a good start.

I'd like to ask the creative minds on StackOverflow to come up with more ideas and/or actual uses of SymbolicC. I'll accept the most upvoted answer.

EDIT Mar 30

The response to the question is a bit scant so far. So, we have this mma extension with more than 60 functions added and virtually nobody has an idea of how to use them? Come on guys, show that you're creative!

Answer 1

Check the CUDALink/OpenCLLink documentation, they have some creative applications

http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/CUDALink/tutorial/Applications.html#818090

http://wolfram.com/xid/0isq3flowdud5n74bny881he6-0wsz71

http://wolfram.com/xid/0d195cdqgdtuw44ioyvm6og9pu-bv64sq

Also the webinars have other examples.

Answer 2

SymbolicC is incredibly effective for writing boilerplate code, or really anything that is largely repetitive. You can use the powerful and intuitive pattern matching and manipulation functions built-in to Mathematica to build up a computation tree using SymbolicC symbols, then transform the tree into a fully-functional C file by passing the tree to ToCCodeString.

Answer 3

Yves Papegay has developed SymbolicC in order to automate the conversion of his models to C. This is used by Airbus.

For more information see his presentations in the Wolfram Library Archive http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter/search/?search_results=1&search_person_id=6281 especially this one http://library.wolfram.com/infocenter/Conferences/7477/

It can give ideas, but there are still many gaps to fill !

Also take a look at the installation folders Mathematica\8.0\AddOns\Applications\CCodeGenerator and Mathematica\8.0\AddOns\Applications\SymbolicC for examples.

Answer 4

This is a very very specific example.

There's something I wanted to do for a while but I didn't have time yet.

Exporting 3D graphics into PDF produces lots and lots and lots of triangles (for the gradients), which aren't joined properly. The result is that rendering time in a PDF reader is very long, the PDF size is very large, and the whole result just looks ugly on screen because the triangle edges are visible. This is also the case when using gradients in 2D plots, or using things like RegionPlot.

There's a C library that converts OpenGL calls to a vector format output, supports PDF, and uses gradients properly in PDF instead of breaking everything down to tiny little triangles:

http://www.geuz.org/gl2ps/

There's an example in the Mathematica docs on how to convert a Graphics3D expression to OpenGL calls (but it's incomplete - check under Applications):

http://reference.wolfram.com/mathematica/SymbolicC/ref/ToCCodeString.html

It'd be nice to join the two and have good looking high quality PDF output for 3D graphics.

This is a lot of work though because 2D objects and text need to be handled properly too (GL2PS does have support for this). But I think it's possible to do it if one has a few days to dedicate to the task.

Answer 5

Further possibilities that I can think of might be

• Genetic Programming.
• Code obfuscation
• Individualization of source code in order to track piracy.

Answer 6

Actually Leonid didn't use SymbolicC in his answer yesterday, he mentioned it as another more powerful way to potentially deal with my question.

I would assume that at some stage of Compile[...,CompilationTarget->"C"] that Mathematica builds an internal expression using SymbolicC. It would be nice to be able to "intercept" it at this stage. To solve my problem from yesterday it would have been brilliant to be able to get the "core" C code that Mathematica generates with Compile. But when Compile produces source code for a C function it of course also adds function definitions, setup code and exit code to make it work as a Mathematica-compliant DLL. If I could programmatically strip that out I would be left with some beautiful (if only machine readable! ;-) highly optimized C code.

For what it's worth even though I was "complaining" about what CForm was giving me I really must say that the C code that Mathematica's Compile[] generates is good. Common subexpression elimination of course, but also it implements raising a real quantity to an integer power as inlined loop of powers-of-2 successive multiplication C code.