Dataflow machines

This paper presents dataflow machines, a model for stream programs aimed at capturing their logical structure in a way that is amenable to analysis, composition, and hardware and software code generation. We discuss the properties of the model, and its relationship to a previous effort, actor machines. Dataflow machines are motivated by the shortcomings of actor machines when generating highly parallel implementations (such as in hardware), and when composing machines. The paper compares and contrasts the two models with emphasis on these two topics