Blech, Imperative Synchronous Programming!

Gretz, Friedrich; Grosch, Franz-Josef

doi:10.1109/fdl.2018.8524036

Cited by 5 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 5 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…As one of the first synchronous languages, Esterel often serves as inspiration or foundation for new languages in this field. For example, SC [Han09a] and ForeC [YGR+16] fuse synchronicity with the C programming language, and synERJY [BPS06] and Blech [GG18] combine synchronicity with object-oriented flavours. Nowadays, what is sometimes referred to as the classical synchronous MoC, is the underlying MoC of Esterel.…”

Section: Control-flow-oriented Languages-esterel and Syncchartsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interactive Model-Based Compilation

Smyth¹

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

There is a growing tendency for using domain-specific languages, which help domain experts to stay focussed on abstract problem solutions. It is important to carefully design these languages and tools, which fundamentally perform model-to-model transformations. The quality of both usually decides the effectiveness of the subsequent development and therefore the quality of the final applications. However, as the complexity and safety requirements of modern systems grow, it becomes increasingly burdensome to create highly customized languages and difficult to provide reasonable overviews within these tools. This thesis introduces a new interactive model-based compilation methodology. Compilations for arbitrary model-to-model transformations are themselves described as models. They can be instantiated for particular inputs, e. g. a program, to create concrete compilation runs, which return the result of that compilation. The compilation instance is interactively observable. Intermediate results serve as new inputs and as documentation. They can be used to create highly customized views and facilitate understandability. This methodology guides modellers from the start of the compilation to the final result so that they can interactively refine their models. The methodology has been implemented and validated as the KIELER Compiler (KiCo) and is available as part of the KIELER open-source project. It is used to implement the current reference compiler for the SCCharts language, a statecharts dialect designed for specifying safety-critical reactive systems based on a synchronous model of computation. The interactive model-based compilation approach was key to the rapid prototyping of three different compilation strategies, as well as new language extensions, variations and closely related languages. The results are verified with benchmarks, which are again modelled using the same approach and technology. The usability of the SCCharts language and the KiCo tooling is documented with long-term surveys and real-life industrial, academic and teaching examples.

show abstract

Section: Control-flow-oriented Languages-esterel and Syncchartsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interactive Model-Based Compilation

Smyth¹

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The more recently developed synchronous languages Blech [GG18] and Céu [SIL+17] are heavily inspired by Esterel and improve the handling of time, working with data structures, and modularity. Quartz [Sch10] is another imperative synchronous language close to Esterel that focuses on hardware software co-design.…”

Section: Different Language Variantsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The translation from imperative Esterel code to SyncCharts [PTH06] illustrates such a procedure but with strong focus of semantic equivalence. The more recent work for the similarly structured Blech language [GG18] applies an approach that emphasizes abstraction and reveals a mode-oriented view on the underlying behavior of the program [LSH+21].…”

Section: C/c++mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The imperative synchronous language Blech [GG18], developed by Bosch Research, is inspired by Esterel and the SC MoC. In addition to classical synchronous programming constructs, it provides C-like abstract data structures, instantaneous functions, and reactive activities that can span multiple ticks.…”

Section: Blechmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Listing 5.1a illustrates a small example with a Counter struct and an activity for automatic incrementing. In the initial proposal [GG18], activities and functions could be associated with a data struct in a class-like fashion. However, Blech never capitalized on this object-based design by introducing visibility restrictions, inheritance, or subtyping.…”

Section: Blechmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Language Design for Reactive Systems

Schulz-Rosengarten

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Reactive systems play a crucial role in the embedded domain. They continuously interact with their environment, handle concurrent operations, and are commonly expected to provide deterministic behavior to enable application in safety-critical systems. In this context, language design is a key aspect, since carefully tailored language constructs can aid in addressing the challenges faced in this domain, as illustrated by the various concurrency models that prevent the known pitfalls of regular threads. Today, many languages exist in this domain and often provide unique characteristics that make them specifically fit for certain use cases. This thesis evolves around two distinctive languages: the actor-oriented polyglot coordination language Lingua Franca and the synchronous statecharts dialect SCCharts. While they take different approaches in providing reactive modeling capabilities, they share clear similarities in their semantics and complement each other in design principles. This thesis analyzes and compares key design aspects in the context of these two languages. For three particularly relevant concepts, it provides and evaluates lean and seamless language extensions that are carefully aligned with the fundamental principles of the underlying language. Specifically, Lingua Franca is extended toward coordinating modal behavior, while SCCharts receives a timed automaton notation with an efficient execution model using dynamic ticks and an extension toward the object-oriented modeling paradigm.

show abstract

Pragmatics Twelve Years Later: A Report on Lingua Franca

Hanxleden

Lee

Fuhrmann³

et al. 2022

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In 2010, Fuhrmann et al. argued for enhancing modeler productivity by providing tooling that, put simply, combines the best of textual and graphical worlds. They referred to this as pragmatics, and argued that a key enabler would be the ability to automatically synthesize customized graphical views from a (possibly textual) model. The model would be the “ground truth” used, for example, for downstream code synthesis and simulation; the graphical views would typically be abstractions from the model serving various purposes, including documentation.Twelve years later, we reflect on their proposal, and illustrate the current state with the recently developed polyglot coordination language Lingua Franca (LF). LF has been designed with pragmatics in mind since early on, and some characteristics of LF make it particularly suited for pragmatics-aware programming and modeling. However, the underlying pragmatic principles are broadly applicable, and by now a set of mature open source tools is available for putting them into practice.

show abstract

Blech, Imperative Synchronous Programming!

Cited by 5 publications

References 5 publications

Interactive Model-Based Compilation

Interactive Model-Based Compilation

Language Design for Reactive Systems

Pragmatics Twelve Years Later: A Report on Lingua Franca

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About