Lambda the Ultimate

As an embedded systems developer I perk up when real-time needs are addressed (not frequently enough here). The Giotto language is claimed "particularly suitable for safety-critical applications with hard real-time constraints."

Strong type systems ... improve robustness and composability of software. However, type systems today ... talk only about static properties of component interfaces.... Dynamic properties, such as calling conventions that state that one method must be called only if another method has been called, are not expressed in the interface definition of a component, except informally. And most system integration problems today arise because of incompatibilities in the dynamic properties of software components....

While promising methods, such as design by contract, have been explored by the research community, our approach is to focus on those techniques that are formally manipulable, and those that embrace concurrency....

Released version 1.0 of the Ptolemy II software ... includes domains for continuous-time modeling, discrete event modeling, synchronous/periodic modeling (Giotto), finite-state machine modeling, and dataflow modeling, as well as a semantic framework for hierarchically combining domains to get mixed models, including hybrid systems, concurrent state machines, and mixed-signal models.