Stream Processing I: A Survey

Stream processing is a term that is used widely in the literature to describe a variety of systems. We present an overview of the historical development of stream processing and a detailed discussion of the different languages and techniques for programming with streams that can be found in the literature. This includes an analysis of reactive systems, specialized logic and functional programming, dataflow and the use of streams in the design and verification of hardware. In particular, we discuss and classify stream processing techniques from the perspective of programming primitives, implementation techniques, and computability issues. This includes a comparison of the different semantic models that are used to formalize stream based computation. 1 INTRODUCTION 2 1 Introduction Within computer science the term stream processing is used generically to refer to the study of a number of disparate systems. For example, dataflow systems, reactive systems, synchronous concurrent algorit..