Hierarchical State Machines

Dropped by Miro Samek’s talk “Hierarchical State Machines: a Fundamentally Important Way of Software Design” at PARC last week, and still thinking about it. While the title is a bit over-the-top, some of the ideas such as a “quantum language” fit quite nicely in an RTOS. Of course, it’s architecture, architecture, architecture.

Mr. Samek himself sees the “framework” as applicable to many areas, such as real-time embedded systems, GUIs, or networking servers. He also is working on a realtime preemptive kernel which he says he will release soon. Why? As he put it himself “Obviously, what I’m doing is cottage-industry, but that’s all I can do alone.” Sounds like a good enough reason – just to try and see if it flies. That’s what exploration is all about.

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