Treo: Textual Syntax for Reo Connectors

TL;DR

This paper introduces Treo, a textual syntax for Reo that maintains its core principles and enhances expressiveness with features like parameter passing, iteration, recursion, and conditionals, facilitating practical large-scale applications.

Contribution

It presents a new textual syntax for Reo that preserves its declarative and compositional principles while supporting advanced programming constructs.

Findings

Reo specifications can be compiled into executable code with competitive performance.

The textual syntax enables more intuitive and scalable protocol specifications.

Ongoing work demonstrates compilation into Java, Promela, and Maude.

Abstract

Reo is an interaction-centric model of concurrency for compositional specification of communication and coordination protocols. Formal verification tools exist to ensure correctness and compliance of protocols specified in Reo, which can readily be (re)used in different applications, or composed into more complex protocols. Recent benchmarks show that compiling such high-level Reo specifications produces executable code that can compete with or even beat the performance of hand-crafted programs written in languages such as C or Java using conventional concurrency constructs. The original declarative graphical syntax of Reo does not support intuitive constructs for parameter passing, iteration, recursion, or conditional specification. This shortcoming hinders Reo's uptake in large-scale practical applications. Although a number of Reo-inspired syntax alternatives have appeared in the past, none of them follows the primary design principles of Reo: a) declarative specification; b) all channel types and their sorts are user-defined; and c) channels compose via shared nodes. In this paper, we offer a textual syntax for Reo that respects these principles and supports flexible parameter passing, iteration, recursion, and conditional specification. In on-going work, we use this textual syntax to compile Reo into target languages such as Java, Promela, and Maude.