Interoperability Part 3: Integrating Two Programming Languages in Practice

June 3, 2024

Wrapping up this video series, MathWorks' Heather Gorr talks about development of projects with multiple programming languages.

William G. Wong

Related To: Electronic Design

What you’ll learn:

What are the first steps when using multiple programming languages?
What are the final steps needed with applications written in multiple languages?

In this last of our three part series, I talked with Heather Gorr, PhD and Principal MATLAB Product Marketing Manager at MathWorks (see the video above), about the starting and ending of projects that employ multiple programming languages. The other two videos in the series are shown below.

Why Interoperability Between Programming Languages is Important

Software

Interoperability Part 1: Using Multiple Programming Languages

MathWorks' Heather Gorr talks about interoperability issues that arise when using multiple programming languages.

Software

Interoperability Part 2: Unifying MATLAB and Python for AI

In Part 2 of this series, MathWorks' Heather Gorr details how to take advantage of Python-based AI and ML libraries via MATLAB.

In general, using function calls to different languages is straightforward like the examples below.

Example: Using Python modules from MATLAB

pe = pyenv(“Version”,’3.7’) 
sqrt_of_42 = py.math.sqrt(42) 
py.foo(10,pyargs(‘bar’,128))

Example: Using MATLAB functions from Python

import matlab.engine 
eng = matlab.engine.start_matlab() 
x = eng.sqrt(128) 
x = eng.gcd(64.0, 32.0, nargout=3) 
end.exit()

Oftentimes, initialization is involved, as are considerations for passing data, especially structure data, pointers, etc. Tools like MATLAB make it easy to package up different modules and libraries into a single package for deployment.

Links

About the Author

William G. Wong | Senior Content Director - Electronic Design and Microwaves & RF

I am Editor of Electronic Design focusing on embedded, software, and systems. As Senior Content Director, I also manage Microwaves & RF and I work with a great team of editors to provide engineers, programmers, developers and technical managers with interesting and useful articles and videos on a regular basis. Check out our free newsletters to see the latest content.

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Check out my blog, AltEmbedded on Electronic Design, as well as his latest articles on this site that are listed below.

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I earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Masters in Computer Science from Rutgers University. I still do a bit of programming using everything from C and C++ to Rust and Ada/SPARK. I do a bit of PHP programming for Drupal websites. I have posted a few Drupal modules.

I still get a hand on software and electronic hardware. Some of this can be found on our Kit Close-Up video series. You can also see me on many of our TechXchange Talk videos. I am interested in a range of projects from robotics to artificial intelligence.