Dataflow Programming Concept, Languages and Applications

Dataflow Programming (DFP) has been a research topic of Software Engineering since the ‘70s. The paradigm models computer programs as a direct graph, promoting the application of dataflow diagram principles to computation, opposing the more linear and classical Von Neumann model. DFP is the core to most visual programming languages, which claim to be able to provide end-user programming: with it’s visual interface, it allows non-technical users to extend or create applications without programming knowledges. Also, DFP is capable of achieving parallelization of computation without introducing development complexity, resulting in an increased performance of applications built with it when using multi-core computers. This survey describes how visual programming languages built on top of DFP can be used for end-user programming and how easy it is to achieve concurrency by applying the paradigm, without any development overhead. DFP’s open problems are discussed and some guidelines for adopting the paradigm are provided.