Adding real-time capabilities to a SML compiler

Li, Muyuan; McArdle, Daniel E.; Murphy, Jeffrey C; Shivkumar, Bhargav; Ziarek, Lukasz

doi:10.1145/2930957.2930958

Cited by 5 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 22 publications

(18 reference statements)

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“…The data also show that Haskell and MLton both have optimized object layouts, indicating these languages are well suited for memory constrained environments. We discuss the details of MLton's object layout in a previous paper …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…SML is a particularly interesting target language for real-time systems as there now exist verified implementations. There are three implementations of SML in particular that we wish to discuss with respect to SML's suitability for real-time, ie, ML-Kit, 86 RTMLton, 87 and OCaml. Although SML has a standard definition, there is no consensus on a concurrency model for the language and most implementations implement their own threading support.…”

Section: Smlmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…85 OCaml, a derivative of SML, provides both a traditional threading model that leverages language level threads tied to OS level threads, as well as a number of other concurrency control primitives. There are three implementations of SML in particular that we wish to discuss with respect to SML's suitability for real-time, ie, ML-Kit, 86 RTMLton, 87 and OCaml. For our empirical evaluation, we pick the MLton implementation of SML as it is considered to be the most performant as it focuses on whole program compilation and optimization.…”

Section: Smlmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…RTMLton, 87 a derivative of MLton, 94 reorganizes MLton's memory allocation scheme so that it uses uniformly sized chunks of memory. By analyzing allocation sizes, an optimal chunk size can be derived to yield constant time allocations.…”

Section: Smlmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A survey of real‐time capabilities in functional languages and compilers

Murphy

Shivkumar

Pritchard

et al. 2018

Concurrency and Computation

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Functional programming languages play an important role in the development of correct software systems. As embedded devices become pervasive and perform critical tasks in our lives, their reliability becomes paramount. This presents a natural opportunity to explore the application of functional programming languages to systems that demand highly predictable behavior.In this paper, we explore existing functional programming language compilers and their applicability to real-time embedded systems. We do this by defining important characteristics needed by a real-time programming language and survey how well existing languages meet these characteristics. We conduct empirical analysis of language runtimes in order to assess the impact of dynamic memory management on predictability and performance. Lastly, we review different programming models for expressing real-time considerations in applications. INTRODUCTIONReal-time software is an integral part in many complex software/hardware systems that require timing guarantees in addition to traditional functional correctness guarantees. Such systems vary in nature, spanning multiple domains including industrial control, robotics, automotive, avionics, and medical devices, among others. These systems all provide services whose utility is dictated by the timeliness in which they respond to external (eg, sensor readings) and internal (eg, software events and interrupts) stimuli. Writing the software for these systems is a difficult undertaking because ensuring the system is correct requires providing predictability guarantees. This is exacerbated by the fact that most software for real-time systems is written in "low level" imperative languages.Functional languages are known for their ability to be reasoned about with respect to correctness, often with automated tools. 1-3 Given that real-time systems are frequently deployed in safety-critical and mission-critical situations, the ability to write software with a high degree of confidence in its correctness and predictability is important. Functional languages are well suited for the former task (correctness), but are not developed for the latter (predictability). Indeed, general purpose, functional programming languages are not used for developing real-time systems and there are no investigations to ensure their predictability. There are, however, many domain-specific functional languages that provide predictability for niche domains. The state of mainstream functional programming languages with respect to their ability to express and provide predictability is something we would like to investigate in this survey.One reason that functional languages are not considered for writing real-time software is because they are managed languages and automatic memory management has classically been considered unpredictable. While many may consider this a reason to reject functional programming as a target language for real-time systems development, we can instead look to managed object-oriented systems for inspiration. Indeed, the ques...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Smlmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Smlmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Smlmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A survey of real‐time capabilities in functional languages and compilers

Murphy

Shivkumar

Pritchard

et al. 2018

Concurrency and Computation

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“…With the renewed popularity of functional programming, practitioners have begun re-examining functional programming languages as an alternative for programming embedded and real-time applications (Hammond, 2001;Wan et al, 2001;Hammond, 2003;Li et al, 2016). Recent advances in program verification (Audebaud & Paulin-Mohring, 2009;Kumar et al, 2014) and formal methods (López et al, 2002;Arts et al, 2004) make functional programming languages appealing, as embedded and real-time systems have more stringent correctness criteria.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Real-time MLton: A Standard ML runtime for real-time functional programs

2021

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There is a growing interest in leveraging functional programming languages in real-time and embedded contexts. Functional languages are appealing as many are strictly typed, amenable to formal methods, have limited mutation, and have simple but powerful concurrency control mechanisms. Although there have been many recent proposals for specialized domain-specific languages for embedded and real-time systems, there has been relatively little progress on adapting more general purpose functional languages for programming embedded and real-time systems. In this paper, we present our current work on leveraging Standard ML (SML) in the embedded and real-time domains. Specifically, we detail our experiences in modifying MLton, a whole-program optimizing compiler for SML, for use in such contexts. We focus primarily on the language runtime, reworking the threading subsystem, object model, and garbage collector. We provide preliminary results over a radar-based aircraft collision detector ported to SML.

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