[Pl-seminar] Semantics Seminar Schedule

[Mitchell Wand]

NU Programming Languages Seminar
Wednesday, November 19, 2008  
11:45-1:30
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)


Geoffrey Mainland
Harvard University

Flask: Staged Functional Programming for Sensor Networks

Severely resource-constrained devices present a confounding challenge
to the functional programmer: we are used to having powerful
abstraction facilities at our fingertips, but how can we make use of
these tools on a device with an 8- or 16-bit CPU and at most tens of
kilobytes of RAM?  Motivated by this challenge, we have developed
Flask, a domain specific language embedded in Haskell that brings the
power of functional programming to sensor networks. Flask consists of
a staging mechanism that cleanly separates node-level code from the
meta-language used to generate node-level code fragments; syntactic
support for embedding standard sensor network code; a restricted
subset of Haskell that runs on sensor networks and constrains program
space and time consumption; a higher-level "data stream" combinator
library for quickly constructing sensor network programs; and an
extensible runtime that provides commonly-used services. Through
microbenchmarks and measurements on physical hardware, we demonstrate
that Flask produces programs that are efficient in terms of CPU and
memory usage and that can run effectively on existing sensor network
hardware.

The full paper is available at
http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mainland/flask/.

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