Spidle: A DSL approach to specifying streaming applications

Abstract

Multimedia stream processing is a rapidly evolving domain which requires much software development and expects high performance. Developing a streaming application often involves low-level programming, critical memory management, and finely tuned scheduling of processing steps. To address these problems, we present a domain-specific language (DSL) named Spidle, for specifying streaming applications. Spidle offers high-level and declarative constructs; compared to general-purpose languages (GPL), it improves robustness by enabling a variety of verifications to be performed. To assess the expressiveness of Spidle in practice, we have used it to specify a number of standardized and special-purpose streaming applications. These specifications are up to 2 times smaller than equivalent programs written in a GPL such as C. We have implemented a compiler for Spidle. Preliminary results show that compiled Spidle programs are roughly as efficient as the compiled, equivalent C programs. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.