Mark Probst (Austria)

The MathMap Image Manipulation Language

MathMap is an image and animation manipulation language which is available as a command-line utility and as a GIMP plug-in. It is similar in intent to Photoshop's Filter Factory but provides an expression language which is more powerful and more user-friendly at the same time.

This paper first gives a short introduction to the MathMap language. We start with a simple example which maps an image to itself and end with a short scripts which renders a Mandelbrot set. Important MathMap language concepts are explained on the way.

The paper's main part is the presentation of the MathMap compiler. To achieve maximum performance MathMap compiles scripts to C code. A naive implementation of such a compiler would yield performance comparable to a fast interpreter. The MathMap compiler, however, performs various optimizations which can cut down the run-time by an order of magnitude compared to a simple compiler.

A very interesting aspect of MathMap is the definition of its built-in operations. These operations are defined in a Lisp-like language. A Lisp program compiles these descriptions to C code, which is used by the compiler to generate intermediate code, from which (after optimizations) the output C code is generated.

This paper will interest a wide audience of advanced developers. Its main points of interest are:

• The compilation of high-level language to efficient C code.
• The abstraction of code generators into a high-level language and the simple generation of C code from such high-level code.