archives

Céu: Structured Synchronous Reactive Programming (SSRP)

Céu is a Esterel-based synchronous language:

www.ceu-lang.org

It appeared in LtU in the past in an announcement of the "SPLASH: Future of Programming Workshop" program.

In this new public version, we are trying to surpass the academic fences with a more polished work (docs, build, etc).

In summary:

  • Reactive: code executes in reactions to events
  • Synchronous: reactions run to completion in discrete logical units of time (there's no implicit preemption nor real parallelism)
  • Structured: programs use structured/imperative control mechanisms, such as "await" and "par" (to combine multiple awaiting lines of execution)

Structured programming avoids deep nesting of callbacks letting programmers code in direct/sequential/imperative style. In addition, when a line of execution is aborted, all allocated resources are safely released.

The synchronous model leads to deterministic execution and simpler reasoning, since it does not demand explicit synchronization from the programmer (e.g., locks and queues). It is also lightweight to fit constrained embedded systems.

We promote SSRP as a complement to classical structured/imperative programming like FRP is now to functional programming.