Towards an Open-Source Modelica Compiler in Julia

Recently the Julia language has become an option for scientific computing.As of 2020, efforts exist to provide libraries that emulate the equation-based modeling features provided by Modelica or otherwise provide such functionality in Julia.The issue with these approaches is that investment in standardization and libraries would be lost unless standard-compliance is guaranteed.We believe that it is possible to combine features from both by implementing such a compiler in Julia.We argue that this approach would open additional opportunities.One such being the handling of variable structure systems (VSS) within the framework of a Modelica standard-compliant compiler.The other being a proposed compiler architecture reminiscent of LLVM for equation-based objectoriented languages.Using the OpenModelica Compiler as a baseline, we verified the fidelity of our implementation by simulating a selected set of models.While there are performance penalties, we argue that improvements to the frontend would mitigate these issues.