Automatically generating code

Wray Buntine suggested the idea of generating code given a model back in 1994. The resulting code should run much faster than a general purpose model "interpreter". We now discuss various attempts to realise this goal.

• BUGS generates model-specific code for doing Gibbs sampling.

• Bruce D'Ambrosio has a system that generates code given a model, evidence, and a specific query (personal communication).

• Kevin Murphy wrote a Matlab program that generates C code for exact inference in DBNs using Geoff Zweig's frontier algorithm back in 1997. Unfortunately, this algorithm is not state of the art...

• Bernd Fischer of NASA Ames is working on AutoBayes, which generates code given a probabilistic model. (Currently this does not support probabilistic graphical models, but does support exact Bayesian inference for small, "classical" models.)

• "Will domain-specific code synthesis become a silver bullet?".