High-level views on low-level representations

Diatchki, Iavor S.; Jones, Mark P.; Leslie, Rebekah

doi:10.1145/1090189.1086387

Cited by 4 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…Another quintessential dimension of this tradition is the development of increasingly fancy type systems [Kaes 1988;Wadler and Blott 1989;Chakravarty et al 2005;Diatchki et al 2005;Peyton Jones et al 2007] (etc.). Such techniques have already been shown useful for parametrising circuit generators by vector widths (Section 2.6.3).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Synchronous digital circuits as functional programs

Gammie

2013

ACM Comput. Surv.

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Functional programming techniques have been used to describe synchronous digital circuits since the early 1980s. Here we survey the systems and formal underpinnings that constitute this tradition. We situate these techniques with respect to other formal methods for hardware design and discuss the work yet to be done.Hardware designs traverse a series of abstraction layers: what might begin as a highlevel behavioural model that addresses architectural issues will, when mature, typically be manually translated into a Register-Transfer Level (RTL) description that captures how the high-level computations are performed by the finite-state means of logic gates and memories. This is typically validated against the original model using simulation and testing, or more formally with model-checking techniques or a proof assistant. The resulting netlists (circuit schematics represented as graphs) are semiautomatically mapped to an implementation technology and laid out for realisation in silicon.The original motivation for developing Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) [Mernik et al. 2005] for the upper reaches of this process was to harness the huge increases in transistor densities on silicon chips forecast by Moore's law [Mead and Conway 1980]. It was hoped that productivity would rise with the abstraction level, yielding designs that were more reusable, scalable, and correct. Traditional imperative programming languages were a poor fit, as their implicit sequentiality conflicts with the intrinsic parallelism of hardware, and a global store is in tension with the ideal of placing computations physically near the relevant state [Nikhil 2011]. For these reasons, I thank

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Synchronous digital circuits as functional programs

Gammie

2013

ACM Comput. Surv.

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“…Diatchki et al [5] augment a Haskell-like language with bitdata: bit-level entities that can be manipulated in various high-level ways in a type-safe manner. Erlang bit patterns [8] allow pattern matching on binary data.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Automatic Transformation of Bit-Level C Code to Support Multiple Equivalent Data Layouts

Nita

Grossman

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract.Portable low-level C programs must often support multiple equivalent in-memory layouts of data, due to the byte or bit order of the compiler, architecture, or external data formats. Code that makes assumptions about data layout often consists of multiple highly similar pieces of code, each designed to handle a different layout. Writing and maintaining this code is difficult and bug-prone: Because the differences among data layouts are subtle, implicit, and inherently low-level, it is difficult to understand or change the highly similar pieces of code consistently.We have developed a small extension for C that lets programmers write concise declarative descriptions of how different layouts of the same data relate to each other. Programmers then write code assuming only one layout and rely on our translation to generate code for the others. In this work, we describe our declarative language for specifying data layouts, how we perform the automatic translation of C code to equivalent code assuming a different layout, and our success in applying our approach to simplify the code base of some widely available software.

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“…There have been proposals for adding unboxed representation control to Haskell [12,8]. However, these systems are pure and therefore and do not consider the effects of mutability.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sound and Complete Type Inference for a Systems Programming Language

Sridhar

Shapiro

Smith

2008

Programming Languages and Systems

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Abstract. This paper introduces a new type system designed for safe systems programming. The type system features a new mutability model that combines unboxed types with a consistent typing of mutability. The type system is provably sound, supports polymorphism, and eliminates the need for alias analysis to determine the immutability of a location. A sound and complete type inference algorithm for this system is presented.

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High-level views on low-level representations

Cited by 4 publications

References 11 publications

Synchronous digital circuits as functional programs

Synchronous digital circuits as functional programs

Automatic Transformation of Bit-Level C Code to Support Multiple Equivalent Data Layouts

Sound and Complete Type Inference for a Systems Programming Language

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