This paper introduces SPar, an internal C++ Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that supports the development of classic stream parallel applications. The DSL uses standard C++ attributes to introduce annotations tagging the notable components of stream parallel applications: stream sources and stream processing stages. A set of tools process SPar code (C++ annotated code using the SPar attributes) to generate FastFlow C++ code that exploits the stream parallelism denoted by SPar annotations while targeting shared memory multi-core architectures. We outline the main SPar features along with the main implementation techniques and tools. Also, we show the results of experiments assessing the feasibility of the entire approach as well as SPar's performance and expressiveness

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Parallel programming has been a challenging task for application programmers. Stream processing is an application domain present in several scientific, enterprise, and financial areas that lack suitable abstractions to exploit parallelism. Our goal is to assess the feasibility of state-of-the-art frameworks/libraries (Pthreads, TBB, and FastFlow) and the SPar domain-specific language for real-world streaming applications (Dedup, Ferret, and Bzip2) targeting multi-core architectures. SPar was specially designed to provide high-level and productive stream parallelism abstractions, supporting programmers with standard C++-11 annotations. For the experiments, we implemented three streaming applications. We discussed SPar's programmability advantages compared to the frameworks in terms of productivity and structured parallel programming. The results demonstrate that SPar improves productivity and provides the necessary features to achieve similar performances compared to the state-of-the-art.

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