English

Adding Real-time Capabilities to a SML Compiler

Programming Languages 2016-01-14 v1

Abstract

There has been much recent interest in adopting functional and reactive programming for use in real-time system design. Moving toward a more declarative methodology for developing real-time systems purports to improve the fidelity of software. To study the benefits of functional and reactive programming for real-time systems, real-time aware functional compilers and language runtimes are required. In this paper we examine the necessary changes to a modern Standard ML compiler, MLton, to provide basic support for real-time execution. We detail our current progress in modifying MLton with a threading model that supports priorities, a chunked object model to support real-time garbage collection, and low level modification to execute on top of a real-time operating system. We present preliminary numbers and our work in progress prototype, which is able to boot ML programs compiled with MLton on x86 machines.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1601.03116,
  title  = {Adding Real-time Capabilities to a SML Compiler},
  author = {Muyuan Li and Daniel E McArdle and Jeffrey C Murphy and Bhargav Shivkumar and Lukasz Ziarek},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1601.03116},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

6 pages, 9 figures, ACM SIGBED

R2 v1 2026-06-22T12:28:20.765Z