ESP: A Language for Programmable Devices (Thesis)
Report ID: TR-646-02Author: Kumar, Sanjeev
Date: 2002-02-00
Pages: 163
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Abstract:
This thesis 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 machines forces a tradeoff that requires giving up ease of programming 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 model that can be used by a model-checking verifier like Spin 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 earlier implementation. We also found that model-checking verifiers like Spin can be used to effectively debug the firmware. Our measurements show that the performance impact on applications of using ESP is small.