Towards a simple and safe Objective Caml compiling framework for the synchronous language SIGNAL

Zhibin Yang (1, 2) , Jean-Paul Bodeveix (2, 3) , M Filali (2, 4)

1 NUAA - Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics [Nanjing]
2 IRIT-ACADIE - Assistance à la Certification d’Applications DIstribuées et Embarquées
3 UT3 - Université Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier
4 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

This paper presents a simple and safe compiler, called MinSIGNAL, from a subset of the synchronous dataflow language SIGNAL to C, as well as its existing enhancements. The compiler follows a modular architecture, and can be seen as a sequence of source-to-source transformations applied to an intermediate representation which is named Synchronous Clocked Guarded Actions (S-CGA) and translation to sequential imperative code. Objective Caml (OCaml) is used for the implementation of MinSIGNAL. As a modern functional language, OCaml is adapted to symbolic computation and so, particularly suitable for compiler design and implementation of formal analysis tools. In particular, the safety of its type checking allows to skip some verification that would be mandatory with other languages. Additionally, this work is a basis for the formal verification of the compilation of SIGNAL with a theorem prover such as Coq.

Mots clés: Synchronous Clocked Guarded Actions (S-CGA); Functional programming; Objective Caml; SIGNAL; Synchronous languages

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]; Systèmes embarqués; Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]; Interface homme-machine [cs.HC]; Architectures Matérielles [cs.AR]; Modélisation et simulation

Zhibin Yang, Jean-Paul Bodeveix, M Filali. Towards a simple and safe Objective Caml compiling framework for the synchronous language SIGNAL. Frontiers of Computer Science, 2019, 13 (4), pp.715-734. ⟨10.1007/s11704-017-6485-y⟩. ⟨hal-02419464⟩