An Esterel compiler for large control-dominated systems

Abstract

Abstract-Embedded hard real-time software systems often need fine-grained parallelism and precise control of timing, things typical real-time operating systems do not provide. The Esterel language has both, but compiling large Esterel programs has been challenging, producing either needlessly slow or large code. This paper presents the first Esterel compiler able to compile large Esterel programs into fast, small code. By choosing a concurrent control-flow graph (CCFG) as its intermediate representation, it preserves many of the control constructs to produce code that can be 100 times faster and half the size than code from other compilers with similar capacity. The primary contribution is an algorithm that generates efficient sequential code from a CCFG. While developed specifically for compiling Esterel, the algorithm could be used to compile other synchronous languages with fine-grained parallelism.

A higher-order extension for imperative synchronous languages

“…In future works, efficient techniques [21,15] shall be used to improve the execution speed of our modular code.…”

“…This approach was successfully used for hardware synthesis and it is still at the core of commercial tools, although the generated software is sometimes slower. Another approach is based on the translation of programs into concurrent control flow graphs [15,21] whose sizes is in linear proportion of the given program. At each instant, the control flow graph is visited until active nodes are found to trigger the execution of the corresponding sub-tree.…”

Synchronous Programming

“…Several techniques for generating efficient and compact code for Esterel have been proposed [24,25,26,27].…”

Separate compilation for synchronous programs

“…Although several success stories have been reported [13], there is still a need for further research on efficient and modular compilation of synchronous languages. In the past years, several different compilation techniques have been developed [10], [18], [12]:…”