skip to main content
research-article

Spot: a programming language for verified flight software

Authors Info & Claims
Published:18 October 2014Publication History
Skip Abstract Section

Abstract

The C programming language is widely used for programming space flight software and other safety-critical real time systems. C, however, is far from ideal for this purpose: as is well known, it is both low-level and unsafe. This paper describes Spot, a language derived from C for programming space flight systems. Spot aims to maintain compatibility with existing C code while improving the language and supporting verification with the SPIN model checker. The major features of Spot include actor-based concurrency, distributed state with message passing and transactional updates, and annotations for testing and verification. Spot also supports domain-specific annotations for managing spacecraft state, e.g., communicating telemetry information to the ground.

We describe the motivation and design rationale for Spot, give an overview of the design, provide examples of Spot's capabilities, and discuss the current status of the implementation.

References

  1. G. Agha. Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computation in Distributed Systems. MIT Press, 1986. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  2. G. Holzmann. The SPIN Model Checker: Primer and Reference Manual. Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 2003. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

Index Terms

  1. Spot: a programming language for verified flight software

          Recommendations

          Comments

          Login options

          Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

          Sign in

          Full Access

          • Published in

            cover image ACM SIGAda Ada Letters
            ACM SIGAda Ada Letters  Volume 34, Issue 3
            HILT '14
            December 2014
            93 pages
            ISSN:1094-3641
            DOI:10.1145/2692956
            Issue’s Table of Contents
            • cover image ACM Conferences
              HILT '14: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM SIGAda annual conference on High integrity language technology
              October 2014
              116 pages
              ISBN:9781450332170
              DOI:10.1145/2663171

            Copyright © 2014 ACM

            Publisher

            Association for Computing Machinery

            New York, NY, United States

            Publication History

            • Published: 18 October 2014

            Check for updates

            Qualifiers

            • research-article

          PDF Format

          View or Download as a PDF file.

          PDF

          eReader

          View online with eReader.

          eReader
          About Cookies On This Site

          We use cookies to ensure that we give you the best experience on our website.

          Learn more

          Got it!