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Section: Software

Heptagon

Participants : Cédric Pasteur [contact] , Brice Gelineau, Léonard Gérard, Adrien Guatto, Marc Pouzet.

Synchronous languages, compilation, optimizing compilation, parallel code generation, behavioral synthesis.

Heptagon is an experimental language for the implementation of embedded real-time reactive systems. It is developed inside the Synchronics large-scale initiative, in collaboration with Inria Rhones-Alpes. It is essentially a subset of Lucid Synchrone, without type inference, type polymorphism and higher-order. It is thus a Lustre-like language extended with hierchical automata in a form very close to SCADE 6. The intention for making this new language and compiler is to develop new aggressive optimization techniques for sequential C code and compilation methods for generating parallel code for different platforms. This explains much of the simplifications we have made in order to ease the development of compilation techniques.

Some extensions have already been made, most notably automata. It's currently used to experiment with linear typing for arrays and also to introduce a concept of asynchronous parallel computations. The compiler developed in our team generates C, java and VHDL code.

Heptagon is jointly developed by Gwenael Delaval and Alain Girault from the Inria POP ART team (Grenoble).