kailiangji / p

The P programming language.

P is a language for asynchronous event-driven programming. P allows the programmer to specify the system as a collection of interacting state machines, which communicate with each other using events. P unifies modeling and programming into one activity for the programmer. Not only can a P program be compiled into executable code, but it can also be validated using systematic testing. P has been used to implement and validate the USB device driver stack that ships with Microsoft Windows 8 and Windows Phone. P is also suitable for the design and implementation of networked, embedded, and distributed systems.

Manual

Check the P manual.

Information for building P framework is available here.

Demos

See fun demo video using P to control a quadrocopter and make sense of the MavLink stream, all visualized in a live DGML diagram.

Application to Robotics

We built DRONA, a software framework for distributed mobile robotics systems. DRONA uses P language for implementing and model-checking the distributed robotics software stack (wiki). The C code generated from P compiler can be easily deployed on Robot Operating System (ROS). More details about the DRONA framework and simulation videos are available here: https://drona-org.github.io/Drona/

We are working on using the DRONA framework for building real-world drone applications using PX4 and extending DRONA with runtime monitoring capabilities for reliability. Details about these extensions will be posted soon.

Publications

• P: Safe asynchronous event-driven programming. Ankush Desai, Vivek Gupta, Ethan Jackson, Shaz Qadeer, Sriram Rajamani, and Damien Zufferey. In Proceedings of ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI), 2013.

• Systematic testing of asynchronous reactive systems. Ankush Desai, Shaz Qadeer, and Sanjit A. Seshia. In Proceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2015).

• DRONA: A Framework for Safe Distributed Mobile Robotics. Ankush Desai, Indranil Saha, Jianqiao Yang, Shaz Qadeer, and Sanjit A. Seshia. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (ICCPS), 2017.

Blogs

• P: A programming language designed for asynchrony, fault-tolerance and uncertainty by Shaz Qadeer.
• Building robust USB 3.0 support

News

• TechWorld[2016]: Microsoft open-sources P language for IoT
• InfoQ[2016]: Microsoft Open-Sources P Language for Safe Async Event-Driven Programming
• Reddit[2016]: Microsoft opensources P language