Article

ESP: a language for programmable devices

Authors:

Yitzhak Mandelbaum,

Kai LiAuthors Info & Claims

PLDI '01: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2001 conference on Programming language design and implementation

Pages 309 - 320

https://doi.org/10.1145/378795.378862

Published: 01 May 2001 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents the design and implementation of Event-driven State-machines Programming (ESP)—a language for programmable devices. In traditional languages, like C, using event-driven state-machine forces a tradeoff that requires giving up ease of development and reliability to achieve high performance. ESP is designed to provide all of these three properties simultaneously.

ESP provides a comprehensive set of features to support development of compact and modular programs. The ESP compiler compiles the programs into two targets—a C file that can be used to generate efficient firmware for the device; and a specification that can be used by a verifier like SPlN to extensively test the firmware.

As a case study, we reimplemented VMMC firmware that runs on Myrinet network interface cards using ESP. We found that ESP simplifies the task of programming with event-driven state machines. It required an order of magnitude fewer lines of code than the previous implementation. We also found that model-checking verifiers like SPIN can be used to effectively debug the firmware. Finally, our measurements indicate that the performance overhead of using ESP is relatively small.

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Cited By

Fisher K(2008)We need more than oneACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/1480828.148084143:11(62-65)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1480828.1480841
Shivers OMight MSchwartzbach MBall T(2006)Continuations and transducer compositionProceedings of the 27th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/1133981.1134016(295-307)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1133981.1134016
Shivers OMight M(2006)Continuations and transducer compositionACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/1133255.113401641:6(295-307)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1133255.1134016
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cover image ACM Conferences

PLDI '01: Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2001 conference on Programming language design and implementation

June 2001

331 pages

ISBN:1581134142

DOI:10.1145/378795

Chairmen:
Michael Burke
IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
,
Mary Lou Soffa
Univ. of Pittsburgh

ACM SIGPLAN Notices Volume 36, Issue 5
May 2001
330 pages
ISSN:0362-1340
EISSN:1558-1160
DOI:10.1145/381694
Editors:
Cindy Norris,
James B. Bergin
Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2001 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 01 May 2001

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PLDI '01 Paper Acceptance Rate 30 of 144 submissions, 21%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 406 of 2,067 submissions, 20%

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Cited By

Fisher K(2008)We need more than oneACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/1480828.148084143:11(62-65)Online publication date: 30-Nov-2008
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1480828.1480841
Shivers OMight MSchwartzbach MBall T(2006)Continuations and transducer compositionProceedings of the 27th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation10.1145/1133981.1134016(295-307)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1133981.1134016
Shivers OMight M(2006)Continuations and transducer compositionACM SIGPLAN Notices10.1145/1133255.113401641:6(295-307)Online publication date: 11-Jun-2006
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1133255.1134016
Bodeveix JFilali MLawall JMuller G(2005)Formal methods meet domain specific languagesProceedings of the 5th international conference on Integrated Formal Methods10.1007/11589976_12(187-206)Online publication date: 29-Nov-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/11589976_12
Xu WKumar SLi K(2004)Fast Paths in Concurrent ProgramsProceedings of the 13th International Conference on Parallel Architectures and Compilation Techniques10.5555/1025127.1026008(189-200)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2004
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1025127.1026008
Wen Xu Kumar SKai Li (2004)Fast paths in concurrent programsProceedings. 13th International Conference on Parallel Architecture and Compilation Techniques, 2004. PACT 2004.10.1109/PACT.2004.1342553(189-200)Online publication date: 2004
https://doi.org/10.1109/PACT.2004.1342553
Lawall JLe Meur AMuller G(2004)On Designing a Target-Independent DSL for Safe OS Process-Scheduling ComponentsGenerative Programming and Component Engineering10.1007/978-3-540-30175-2_23(436-455)Online publication date: 2004
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-30175-2_23
Kumar SLi KCuller DDruschel P(2002)Using model checking to debug device firmwareProceedings of the 5th symposium on Operating systems design and implementation (Copyright restrictions prevent ACM from being able to make the PDFs for this conference available for downloading)10.5555/1060289.1060296(61-74)Online publication date: 9-Dec-2002
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1060289.1060296
Hawblitzel Cvon Eicken T(2002)LunaACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review10.1145/844128.84416436:SI(391-403)Online publication date: 31-Dec-2002
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/844128.844164
Castro MDruschel PGanesh ARowstron AWallach D(2002)Secure routing for structured peer-to-peer overlay networksACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review10.1145/844128.84415636:SI(299-314)Online publication date: 31-Dec-2002
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/844128.844156
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