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RTMLton: An SML Runtime for Real-Time Systems

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Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages (PADL 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 12007))

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Abstract

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 in the embedded and real-time domains. Specifically we detail our experiences in modifying MLton, a whole program, optimizing compiler for Standard ML, for use in such contexts. We focus primarily on the language runtime, re-working the threading subsystem and garbage collector. We provide preliminary results over a radar-based aircraft collision detector ported to SML.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Most real-time systems have a specific set of priorities they support.

  2. 2.

    Almost all dynamically allocated arrays are small and fit into one chunk making them O(1) access and large arrays are statically allocated and their size known up front so the O(log(n)) access time can be taken into consideration when validating the system.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been support in part by National Science Foundation grants: CCF 1749539 and CNS 1823230.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. SUNY - University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY, USA

    Bhargav Shivkumar, Jeffrey Murphy & Lukasz Ziarek

Authors
  1. Bhargav Shivkumar
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  2. Jeffrey Murphy
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  3. Lukasz Ziarek
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Correspondence to Bhargav Shivkumar .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK

    Ekaterina Komendantskaya

  2. Stony Brook University, New York, USA

    Yanhong Annie Liu

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Shivkumar, B., Murphy, J., Ziarek, L. (2020). RTMLton: An SML Runtime for Real-Time Systems. In: Komendantskaya, E., Liu, Y. (eds) Practical Aspects of Declarative Languages. PADL 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12007. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39197-3_8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39197-3_8

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-39196-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-39197-3

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