Misplaced Pages

Atom (programming language)

Article snapshot taken from Wikipedia with creative commons attribution-sharealike license. Give it a read and then ask your questions in the chat. We can research this topic together.
Atom
ParadigmFunctional, synchronous, reactive
FamilyHaskell
Designed byThomas Hawkins
First appeared2007; 17 years ago (2007)
Stable release1.0.13 / November 13, 2021; 3 years ago (2021-11-13)
Typing disciplinestatic, strong
OSCross-platform
LicenseBSD3
Websitehackage.haskell.org/package/atom
Influenced by
Bluespec, Confluence, Haskell

Atom is a domain-specific language (DSL) in Haskell, for designing real-time embedded software.

History

Originally intended as a high-level hardware description language (HDL), Atom was created in early 2007 and released as free and open-source software (FOSS) of April of that year. Inspired by TRS and Bluespec, Atom compiled circuit descriptions, that were based on guarded atomic operations, or conditional term rewriting, into Verilog netlists for simulation and logic synthesis. As a hardware compiler, Atom's main objective is to maximize the number of operations, or rules, that can execute in a given clock cycle without violating the semantics of atomic operation. By employing the properties of conflict-free and sequentially composable rules, Atom reduced maximizing execution concurrency to a feedback arc set optimization of a rule-data dependency graph. This process was similar to James Hoe's original algorithm.

When Atom's author switched careers in late 2007, from logic design to embedded system software engineering, Atom was redesigned from an HDL to a domain-specific language targeting hard real-time computing embedded applications. As a result, Atom's compiler's main objective changed from maximizing rule concurrency to balancing processing load and minimizing worst case timing latency. In September 2008, Atom was presented at the Commercial Users of Functional Programming (CUFP) conference. In April 2009, in its new form, it was released as FOSS.

Overview

Atom is a concurrent programming language intended for embedded applications. Atom features compile time task scheduling and generates code with deterministic execution time and memory use, simplifying worst case execution time analysis for applications that need hard realtime performance. Atom's concurrency model is that of guarded atomic actions, which eliminates the need for, and the problems of using, mutex locks.

By removing runtime task scheduling and mutex locking, two services traditionally served by a real-time operating system (RTOS), Atom can eliminate the need and overhead of an RTOS in embedded applications.

Limits

To provide guarantees of deterministic execution time and memory consumption, Atom places several restrictions on computing. First, Atom designs are always finite state: all variables are global and declared at compile time and dynamic memory allocation is disallowed. Second, Atom provides no function or looping constructs. Instead, state variable updates are pure combinational logic functions of the current state.

References

  1. ANN: Atom: Yet another Haskell HDL (Report).
  2. ^ Hoe, James C.; Arvind (November 2000). Synthesis of Operation-Centric Hardware Descriptions (PDF). International Conference on Computer Aided Design (ICCAD).
  3. "Controlling Hybrid Vehicles with Haskell". Archived from the original on 2008-07-04. Retrieved 2009-12-05.
  4. ANN: atom-0.0.2

External links

Haskell programming
Software
Implementations
(features)
Dialects
Electronic design
Libraries
Package managers
Windowing systems
Web frameworks
Book
Community
Eponym
Italics = discontinued
  • ° = Open-source software
    Book Category:Family Category:Software
    • Categories: