Section: Software

Lucid Synchrone

Participant : Marc Pouzet [contact] .

Synchronous languages, type and clock inference, causality analysis, compilation

Lucid Synchrone is a language for the implementation of reactive systems. It is based on the synchronous model of time as provided by Lustre combined with features from ML languages. It provides powerful extensions such as type and clock inference, type-based causality and initialization analysis and allows to arbitrarily mix data-flow systems and hierarchical automata or flows and valued signals.

It is distributed under binary form, at URL http://www.di.ens.fr/~pouzet/lucid-synchrone/ .

The language was used, from 1996 to 2006 as a laboratory to experiment various extensions of the language Lustre. Several programming constructs (e.g. merge, last, mix of data-flow and control-structures like automata), type-based program analysis (e.g., typing, clock calculus) and compilation methods, originaly introduced in Lucid Synchrone are now integrated in the new SCADE 6 compiler developped at Esterel-Technologies and commercialized since 2008.

Three major release of the language has been done and the current version is V3 (dev. in 2006). The language is still used for teaching and in our research but we do not develop it anymore. Nonetheless, we have integrated several features from Lucid Synchrone in new research prototypes described below.