statechart

A rust implementation of statecharts. Statecharts are a visual approach to expressing hierarchical state machines, useful for describing reactive, event-driven systems. Statecharts were originally introduced in Harel87. Harel07 gives background and context to the innovation and development of statecharts. For technical context, application to MDSD and practical systems design, see D. Harel and M. Politi, Modeling Reactive Systems with Statecharts: The STATEMATE Approach, (with M. Politi).

Current project focus

This crate initially aims to provide a statechart document model and interpreter, influenced by, and probably mostly isomorphic to the concepts, entities and behaviors described in the W3C State Chart XML specification. However, the focus is not full scxml compliance, but the following use-cases:

• Rust macros for expressing and executing statecharts from Rust code directly.
• Interpreter compatibility with futures & streams to support asynchronous execution.
• Automating some useful, operational tasks with software agents, expressed as statecharts.
  • Personal assistants
  • Automated software operations, auto-{healing,scaling,alerting,reconfiguring}
  • Privacy and security, "situational awareness" for networked applications & devices
• Performance, after usefulness and correctness

Possible areas of further interest

Applications which I am not actively developing for yet, but could be interesting and useful contributions:

• no_std support for embedded applications. The kind of thing statecharts were invented for!
• A compiler backend. Target LLVM or an FPGA!
• SCXML compatibility, where it doesn't conflict with the above goals, and there's a good use for the angle brackets.

Copyright 2017 Casey Marshall

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