The translation of MATLAB to C is an important step to raise the overall abstraction level when mapping computations to embedded systems, and thus to increase productivity and to achieve a full-automated model-driven design-flow. This paper describes recent work developed in MATISSE, a MATLAB to C compiler targeting embedded systems. We introduce several techniques to allow the efficient implementation of C code, such as weak types, primitives and pointer views. We evaluate the compiler with a set of 9 publicly available benchmarks, targeting both embedded systems and a desktop system. We compare the execution time of the generated C code with the original code running on MATLAB, achieving a geometric mean speedup of 8.1×, and qualitatively compare with the performance of related work.