Clock-directed Modular Code Generation from Synchronous Block Diagrams
Dariusz Biernacki, Jean-Louis Colaço, Marc Pouzet · 2007
The compilation of synchronous block diagrams into sequential imperative code has been addressed in the early eighties and can be considered now as folklore. However, separate or modular code generation, though largely used in existing compilers and particularly in industrial ones, has been neither precisely described nor entirely formalized. Such a formalization appears now as a fundamental need in the long-term goal to develop a mathematically certified compiler for a synchronous language as well as in simplifying existing implementations. This article presents in full detail the modular compilation of synchronous block diagrams into sequential code. We consider a first-order functional language reminiscent of Lustre which it extends with a general n-ary merge operator, a reset construct and a richer notion of clocks. The clocks are used to express activation of computations in the program and are specifically taken into account during the compilation process to produce efficient imperative code. We introduce a generic object-based intermediate language to represent transition functions and we present a concise clock-directed translation function from the source to the intermediate language. We also address the target code generation phase by describing a translation from the intermediate language to Java and C. 1.