Feldspar – A Functional Embedded Language for Digital Signal Processing*

Digital Signal Processing (DSP) algorithms are usually designed and described on an abstract level and than transformed to a DSP chip specific C code by expert programmers. The problem is that the gap between the abstract description and the platform dependent code is huge and even the C code optimized for two different chips differ a lot. This makes it expensive to rewrite the algorithms each time a new chip is targeted. We expect that designing and implementing a high-level domain-specific language (DSL) will make the implementation of algorithms easier and a compiler together with platform-specific code generator and optimizer modules will take the burden of target-dependent low-level programming off the programmers. To address these problems, we propose a new programming language called Feldspar (Functional Embedded Language for Digital Signal Processing and Parallelism). We started the design and implementation of this language a year ago, and now we have a compiler prototype which translates programs written in Feldspar into hardware-indepdendent ISO C99-compilant code.