A Hybrid Data-flow Visual Programing Language*

Abstract

In this paper, we introduced a Hybrid Data-flow Visual Programing Language (HDVPL), which is an extended C/C++ language with a visual frontend and a dataflow runtime library. Although, most of the popular dataflow visual programming languages are designed for specialized purposes, HDVPL is for general-purpose programming. Unlike the others, the dataflow node behavior of HDVPL can be customized by programmer. Our intuitive visual interface can easily build a general-purpose dataflow program. It provides a visual editor to create nodes and connect them to form a DAG of dataflow task. This makes the beginner of computer programming capable of building parallel programs easily. With subgraph feature, complex hierarchical graphs can be built with container node. After the whole program is accomplished, the HDVPL can translate it into text-based source code and compile it into object file, which will be linked with HDVPL dataflow runtime library. To visualize dataflow programs in runtime, we integrated our dataflow library with frontend visual editor. The visual frontend will show the detailed information about the running program in console window.