Modelling and Evaluating the StreamBits language

This thesis concludes the evaluation of a new high level programming language for stream applications, StreamBits. The goal with the project is to evaluate the programmability, with the focus on expressing machine-independent parallelism and bit-level computations in StreamBits. As of now, the programming language is prototyped in a Java framework. This project also involves improvement and expansion of this framework. An examination of the framework was conducted. The conclusions of this examination was the foundation of the changes implemented in the framework during the improvement and expansion part of this project. Evaluation experiments were done using the improved version of the framework. The evaluation was based on a comparison of programs implemented in StreamBits and another programming language typically used by industry for this kind of applications. The focus of the evaluation was to evaluate how well the new data-types and stream constructs of StreamBits can be used and expressed compared to other languages. The results are partly the improvements and expansion of the framework, partly the results of the tests conducted during the evaluation. Results show that the new data-types and stream constructs of StreamBits are valuable additions to a stream programming language. The data-types and stream constructs assists the programmer to write source code that is not closely bound to a specific architecture