Real-Time Mentat programming language and architecture

Abstract

Real-time Mentat, a programming environment designed to simplify the task of programming real-time applications in distributed and parallel environments, is described. It is based on the same data-driven computation model and object-oriented programming paradigm as Mentat. It provides an easy-to-use mechanism to exploit parallelism, language constructs for the expression and enforcement of timing constraints, and run-time support for scheduling and exciting real-time programs. The Real-time Mentat programming language is an extended C++. The extensions are added to facilitate automatic detection of data flow and generation of data flow graphs, to express the timing constraints of individual granules of computation, and to provide scheduling directives for the runtime system. A high-level view of the Real-time Mentat system architecture and programming language constructs is provided.<>