[Pl-seminar] 5/16: Christian Skalka, A Principled Approach to Practical Embedded Device Programming

[Vincent St-Amour]

NEU Programming Languages Seminar presents

Christian Skalka
University of Vermont

Thursday, 5/16
11:45-1:30
Room 366 WVH (http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/wand/directions.html)


A Principled Approach to Practical Embedded Device Programming

In this talk we describe the design and implementation of a domain
specific language, called Scalaness, for embedded wireless device
programming. It is intended to support automated or semi-automated
device program refinement and device control from a high powered
hub. High level language abstractions are desirable to define complex
refinement and control algorithms, but embedded devices are often
severely resource constrained and are best programmed with domain
specific low level code. We leverage a form of staged aka meta
programming to bridge the gap between high level code refinement
techniques and efficient device level programs.

In addition to staging, Scalaness incorporates several advanced
language features, including a type system supporting dynamic type
construction and type specialization of device code. A static type
analysis provides "two-stage" type safety, where static type checking
ensures type safety of dynamically refined code. These features
required significant theoretical consideration in their design, and we
will show how they were initially developed in a foundational core
calculus and then "ported" to the more practical Scalaness
setting. Scalaness has been implemented as an extension of Scala and
TinyOS.