Hailstorm: A Statically-Typed, Purely Functional Language for IoT Applications

Sarkar, Abhiroop; Sheeran, Mary

doi:10.1145/3414080.3414092

Cited by 11 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 60 publications

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“…Our previous work [22] has attempted to use the Functional Reactive Programming (FRP) paradigm [6] for the programming of microcontrollers. However, it suffered from the performance penalties of polling, owing to the pull-based semantics of FRP, which has been addressed in this higherorder concurrency model.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Higher-order concurrency for microcontrollers

Sarkar

Krook

Svensson

et al. 2021

Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes

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Programming microcontrollers involves low level interfacing with hardware and peripherals that are concurrent and reactive. Such programs are typically written in a mixture of C and assembly using concurrent language extensions (like FreeRTOS tasks and semaphores), resulting in unsafe, callback-driven, error-prone and difficult-to-maintain code.We address this challenge by introducing SenseVM -a bytecode-interpreted virtual machine that provides a message passing based higher-order concurrency model, originally introduced by Reppy, for microcontroller programming. This model treats synchronous operations as first-class values (called Events) akin to the treatment of first-class functions in functional languages. This primarily allows the programmer to compose and tailor their own concurrency abstractions and, additionally, abstracts away unsafe memory operations, common in shared-memory concurrency models, thereby making microcontroller programs safer, composable and easier-to-maintain.Our VM is made portable via a low-level bridge interface, built atop the embedded OS -Zephyr. The bridge is implemented by all drivers and designed such that programming in response to a software message or a hardware interrupt remains uniform and indistinguishable. In this paper we demonstrate the features of our VM through an example, written in a Caml-like functional language, running on the nRF52840 and STM32F4 microcontrollers.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Higher-order concurrency for microcontrollers

Sarkar

Krook

Svensson

et al. 2021

Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Managed Programming Languages and Runtimes

Self Cite

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“…Hailstorm [64], and Haski [80]. None of these languages are tierless IoT languages as they have no automatic integration with the server.…”

Section: Functional Reactivementioning

confidence: 99%

Could Tierless Languages Reduce IoT Development Grief?

Lubbers

Koopman

Ramsingh

et al. 2023

ACM Trans. Internet Things

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Internet of Things (IoT) software is notoriously complex, conventionally comprising multiple tiers. Traditionally an IoT developer must use multiple programming languages and ensure that the components interoperate correctly. A novel alternative is to use a single tierless language with a compiler that generates the code for each component and ensures their correct interoperation. We report a systematic comparative evaluation of two tierless language technologies for IoT stacks: one for resource-rich sensor nodes (Clean with iTask), and one for resource-constrained sensor nodes (Clean with iTask and mTask). The evaluation is based on four implementations of a typical smart campus application: two tierless and two Python-based tiered. (1) We show that tierless languages have the potential to significantly reduce the development effort for IoT systems, requiring 70% less code than the tiered implementations. Careful analysis attributes this code reduction to reduced interoperation (e.g. two embedded domain-specific languages (DSLs) and one paradigm versus seven languages and two paradigms), automatically generated distributed communication, and powerful IoT programming abstractions. (2) We show that tierless languages have the potential to significantly improve the reliability of IoT systems, describing how Clean iTask/mTask maintains type safety, provides higher order failure management, and simplifies maintainability. (3) We report the first comparison of a tierless IoT codebase for resource-rich sensor nodes with one for resource-constrained sensor nodes. The comparison shows that they have similar code size (within 7%), and functional structure. (4) We present the first comparison of two tierless IoT languages, one for resource-rich sensor nodes, and the other for resource-constrained sensor nodes.

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“…However, in contrast to in mTask, the tasks are not interpreted and there is no automated communication with a server. Other examples are CFRP (Suzuki et al, 2017), XFRP (Shibanai and Watanabe, 2018), Juniper (Helbling and Guyer, 2016), Hailstorm (Sarkar and Sheeran, 2020), Haski (Valliappan et al, 2020), arduino-copilot (Hess, 2020).…”

Section: Functional Reactive Programmingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…FRP is a declarative paradigm often used for implementing the perception layer of an IoT stack. Examples include mfrp (Sawada and Watanabe, 2016), CFRP (Suzuki et al, 2017), XFRP (Shibanai and Watanabe, 2018), Juniper (Helbling and Guyer, 2016), Hailstorm (Sarkar and Sheeran, 2020), and Haski (Valliappan et al, 2020). None of these languages are tierless IoT languages as they have no automatic integration with the server.…”

Section: Functional Reactive Programmingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Orchestrating the Internet of Things with Task-Oriented Programming

Lubbers

2023

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The development of reliable software for the internet of things (IoT) is difficult because IoT systems are dynamic, interactive, distributed, collaborative, multi-tiered, and multitasking in nature. The complexity is increased further by semantic friction that arises through different hardware and software characteristics between tiers. Many computers that operate in IoT systems are edge devices that interact with the environment using sensors and actuators. Edge devices are often powered by low-cost microcontrollers designed for embedded applications. They have little memory, unhurried processors, and are slow in communication but are also small and energy efficient. Task-oriented programming (TOP) can cope with the challenges of IoT programming. In TOP, the main building blocks are tasks, an abstract representation of work. During execution, the current value of the task is observable, and other tasks can act upon it. Collaboration patterns can be modelled by combining and transforming tasks into compound tasks. Programming edge devices benefits from TOP as well, but running such a system within the limitations of resource-constrained microcontrollers is not straightforward. This dissertation demonstrates how to include edge devices in TOP systems using domain-specific languages (DSLs). With these techniques, all tiers and their interoperation of an IoT system are specified in a single high-level source, language, paradigm, high abstraction level, and type system. First, I present advanced DSL embedding techniques. Then mTask is shown, a TOP DSL for IoT edge devices, embedded in iTask. Tasks are constructed and compiled at run time in order to allow tasks to be tailored to the current work requirements. The task is then sent to the device for interpretation. A device is programmed once with a lightweight domain-specific OS to be used in an mTask system. This OS executes tasks in an energy-efficient way and automates all communications and data sharing. All aspects of the mTask system are shown: example applications, language design, implementation details, integration with iTask, and green computing facilities such as automatic sleeping. Finally, tierless IoT programming is compared to traditional tiered programming. In tierless programming frameworks, the size of the code and the number of required programming languages is reduced significantly. By using a single paradigm and a system-wide type system, tierless programming reduces problems such as semantic friction; maintainability and robustness issues; and interoperation safety.

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Hailstorm: A Statically-Typed, Purely Functional Language for IoT Applications

Cited by 11 publications

References 60 publications

Higher-order concurrency for microcontrollers

Higher-order concurrency for microcontrollers

Could Tierless Languages Reduce IoT Development Grief?

Orchestrating the Internet of Things with Task-Oriented Programming

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