Removing Cycles in Esterel Programs

Abstract

Programs written in the synchronous programming language Esterel may contain statically cyclic dependencies of signals, which inhibits the application of certain compilation approaches that rely on static scheduling. This talk proposes an algorithm which, given a constructive synchronous program, performs a semantics-preserving source-level code transformation that removes cyclic signal dependencies. The transformation exploits the monotonicity of constructive programs, and is illustrated in the context of Esterel, but should be applicable to other synchronous languages as well.