GC: the data-flow graph format of synchronous programming

Abstract

Based on an abstraction of the time as a discrete logical time, the synchronous languages, armed with a strong semantics, enable the design of safe real-time applications. Some of them are of imperative style, while others are declarative. Academic and industrial teams involved in synchronous programming defined together three intermediate representations, on the way to standardization: • IC, a parallel format of imperative style, • GC, a parallel format of data-flow style, • OC, a sequential format to describe automata. In this paper, we describe more specifically the format GC, and its links with the synchronous data-flow language SIGNAL. Thanks to the first experimentations, GC reveals itself as a powerful representation for graph transformations, code production, optimization, hardware synthesis, etc.