Concurrency and Communication: Lessons from the SHIM Project

Abstract

Describing parallel hardware and software is difficult, especially in an embedded setting. Five years ago, we started the shim project to address this challenge by developing a programming language for hardware/software systems. The resulting language describes asynchronously running processes that has the useful property of scheduling-independence: the i/o of a shim program is not affected by any scheduling choices. This paper presents a history of the shim project with a focus on the key things we have learned along the way