I was looking for similar tools in Matlab a few years ago. However the one I found were only focused on one part of the solution to implement the kind of behavior you are describing. Therefore, I tried to implement a class which performs automatic persistent memoization by defining a directed acyclic graph (DAG) where nodes are Matlab functions. If the node main function and all the sub-functions called during the node execution (a) and the input variables of the node (b) remain unchanged, then the results are retrieved from the disk and not re-computed. This holds true even across different Matlab processes as it is based on the file system.
For (a), the major time consumer is the code analysis to find out the sub-functions involved in the main function execution. Therefore, I also persisted this "dependency" information based on the last modified date of the function files.
For (b), either the variable content is hashed or the variable mat-file date is taken to check that the variables did not change
Moreover, I wanted to declare the DAG only with Matlab and not driving it with Make as you wrote and also wanted to visualize the execution of the DAG. Therefore, I implemented the following class: https://de.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/71180-explore
Not sure if it is the kind of tool you are looking for, but if in the meantime you found other solutions or other relevant discussions, I would be curious to know about :-) Thanks !
