The ESTEREL synchronous programming language: design, semantics, implementation
Science of Computer Programming
On Communicating Finite-State Machines
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
System architecture directions for networked sensors
ASPLOS IX Proceedings of the ninth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
What's Ahead for Embedded Software?
Computer
Cooperative Task Management Without Manual Stack Management
ATEC '02 Proceedings of the General Track of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
The nesC language: A holistic approach to networked embedded systems
PLDI '03 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 2003 conference on Programming language design and implementation
On the duality of operating system structures
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
MANTIS: system support for multimodAl NeTworks of in-situ sensors
WSNA '03 Proceedings of the 2nd ACM international conference on Wireless sensor networks and applications
TinyGALS: a programming model for event-driven embedded systems
Proceedings of the 2003 ACM symposium on Applied computing
Contiki - A Lightweight and Flexible Operating System for Tiny Networked Sensors
LCN '04 Proceedings of the 29th Annual IEEE International Conference on Local Computer Networks
galsC: A Language for Event-Driven Embedded Systems
Proceedings of the conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe - Volume 2
A dynamic operating system for sensor nodes
Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
Computer
Beyond event handlers: programming wireless sensors with attributed state machines
IPSN '05 Proceedings of the 4th international symposium on Information processing in sensor networks
Why events are a bad idea (for high-concurrency servers)
HOTOS'03 Proceedings of the 9th conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems - Volume 9
Threads2Events: an automatic code generation approach
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Hot Topics in Embedded Networked Sensors
A comprehensive compiler-assisted thread abstraction for resource-constrained systems
Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Information processing in sensor networks
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The prevailing paradigm in the regime of resource-constrained embedded devices is event-driven programming. It offers a lightweight yet powerful concurrency model without multiple stacks resulting in reduced memory usage compared to multi-threading. However, event-driven programs need to be implemented as explicit state machines, often with no or limited support from the development tools, resulting in ad-hoc and unstructured code that is error-prone and hard to debug. This paper presents TinyVT, an extension of the nesC language that provides a virtual threading abstraction on top of the event-driven execution model of TinyOS with minimal penalty in memory usage. TinyVT employs a simple continuation mechanism to permit blocking wait, thus allowing split-phase operations within C control structures without relying on multiple stacks. Furthermore, it provides fine-grained scoping of variables shared between event handlers resulting in safer code and allowing for optimizations in compile-time memory allocation. TinyVT source code is mapped to nesC with a source-to-source translator, using synchronous communicating state machines as an intermediate representation.