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Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Transplant: yet another bridge between MATLAB and Python, but a good one!

This post is basically just an advertisement for a project done by a Master's student that I'm co-supervising at the moment.  While there are numerous methods already out there to link MATLAB to Python (and rumour has it that the next(?) release will make it easier to call Python from MATLAB), I think Basti's "transplant" (github link) strikes a good balance between simplicity and capability.  Bastian's code is elegant and reliable.  My own contribution has just been a small bug fix, the ability to transfer logical (boolean) matrices, and an attempt to add the ability to capture MATLAB's stdout (Bastian came up with a much better solution).

For me the resulting killer feature is that I can write IPython notebooks that call MATLAB code in a sane way.  Complex code which would take too much effort to convert to Python can be called, then the results can be plotted in the Notebook, which is great when working remotely (a longer post on my workflow is in the works...).  Results become more accessible, with a lot of the complexity hidden away in .m files.

So, check it out and spread the word!