Flask: staged functional programming for sensor networks

14 years 10 months ago

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Severely resource-constrained devices present a confounding challenge to the functional programmer: we are used to having powerful ion facilities at our fingertips, but how can we make use of these tools on a device with an 8- or 16-bit CPU and at most tens of kilobytes of RAM? Motivated by this challenge, we have developed Flask, a domain specific language embedded in Haskell that brings the power of functional programming to sensor networks, collections of highly resource-constrained devices. Flask consists of a staging mechanism that cleanly separates node-level code from the meta-language used to generate node-level code fragments; syntactic support for embedding standard sensor network code; a restricted subset of Haskell that runs on sensor networks and constrains program space and time consumption; a higher-level "data stream" combinator library for quickly constructing sensor network programs; and an extensible runtime that provides commonly-used services. We demonst...

Geoffrey Mainland, Greg Morrisett, Matt Welsh

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