Networks of Preemptible Reactive Processes: An Implementation

Reactive languages such as Esterel, Lustre, Signal , Statecharts etc have found wide use in the development of veriiable software for reactive applications. It has been recently argued that both asynchrony and perfect synchrony are needed for the speciication of complex reactive systems and a paradigm called Communicating Reactive Processes has been proposed for such a uniication. The paradigm consists of networks of synchronous (perfect) nodes communicating asynchronously. This paper addresses the implementation issues of such paradigms. It presents a deadlock free protocol for the implementation of a rendezvous primitive between a set of preemptible processes. The implementation is also shown to preserve the reactive nature of the synchronous nodes. The paper also shows how the implementation of Hoare's CSP like choice primitives comes for free using this protocol.