Case Studies in Cryptol - A study of domain specific languages for DSP algorithms

Sammanfattning: Digital Signal Processing (DSP) has become part of many electronic applications these days;confluent to this, Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) are prevailing among practitioners ofmany engineering domains. Cryptol is a domain specific language for cryptography, it wasdesigned by Galois and it has been used by NSA from the start. Cryptol is designed forcryptographic specifications; however, this project aims at evaluating Cryptol as a domainspecific language for digital signal processing algorithms. The report also includes a proposal forextensions to Cryptol to make it applicable to DSP algorithms. This thesis derives its motivationfrom the DSL for DSP research that the Functional Programming group has started withEricsson. This project involved implementing a set of DSP algorithms in Cryptol and analyzingapplicability of Cryptol from the experiences in this new domain. This study shows that Cryptolis too specialised to cryptographic algorithms and that it is not possible to specify, run or verifymany DSP algorithms in Cryptol. However there is a special class of DSP algorithms that are fareasier to code in Cryptol than in C or Java. Small overlap with DSP algorithms was expectedsince DSLs are customized for a certain problem area. The evaluation of Cryptol in the DSPdomain revealed that some enhancements are necessary to make it applicable to DSP algorithms.The outcome of this study is a set of extensions to Cryptol which are discussed towards the endof this report.